The publishing industry is struggling to cash in on eBooks; so far the digital literary attempt has been fragmented and slow, both in terms of adoption and in getting the material to the reader. However, that may change soon, given new initiatives announced in the last few days ranging from the arrival of new industry standards to a new reader with some cool effects

"Opinion: Is Microsoft just selling the ammo? Or, is Microsoft fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons?"

"We now know what happens when big hairy software coders work with big hairy lawyers. The result, understandably, is anything but slick."

Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity.

"The Free Software Foundation today released the final version of the new GNU General Public License, GPLv3. Novell welcomes and supports GPLv3 and we appreciate the collaborative process that led to its conclusion."

Several large software companies seem satisfied with GPLv3, albeit cautious about adopting it (as corporations are wont to do). IBM intends to release some software under GPLv3, and MySQL says it will switch if GPLv3 is adopted widely.

A Groklaw link to a talk given by Eben Moglen on June 26th to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law, "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3".

Proprietary record formats will increase the difficulty of preserving our culture, on top of the problems with obsolete hardware interfaces and the decay of storage media we think of as permanent. File data formats that are not published standards are just asking for trouble for long term data storage.