eReaders

I saw an ad for the Kobo reader from Boarders for just under $100.00 today. That is the kind of price point that would make them something even more people will consider. They still are not as friendly as a TV. There are problems with DRM, conflicting file formats, moving between devices and computer interfaces. I don't envy the public librarians who have had to tell the folks who got a Kindle for the holiday that it doesn't work at the library. I still enjoy mine, I can download all the Kipling, Haggard, Verne and Wilkie Collins I desire from Project Gutenberg and the Adelaide University Electronic Texts Collection. Without the backlighting it is much easier on the eyes.

One thing e-readers still lack is color. Did anyone see color e-readers at Midwinter or CES? Without color textbooks, comics, and magazines lose too much to work on the devices. Some books and journal articles also demand color (art books and geologic maps for instance)

OPDS

Add Open Publishing Distribution System(OPDS) to the slew of metadata acronyms to be aware of.

Based on the widely implemented Atom Syndication Format, OPDS Catalogs have been developed since 2009 by a group of ebook developers, publishers, librarians, and booksellers interested in providing a lightweight, simple, and easy to use format for developing catalogs of digital books, magazines, and other content.

How this compares to OAI-PMH I'll have to investigate. When would one or the other be most appropriate? What tools are there to create it and use it?

COinS Generator

It seems the COinS Generator is not working, at least when given a DOI it returns the target not a Content Object in Spans. Is there no alternative tool? I couldn't find one. If that is the case, is it because COinS is pretty useless and no one bothered to create another generator? If COinS are useful, maybe another instance of the generator or a different but similar service would be a good thing.

In principle, I like microformats. Anything that supplies more semantics to information is something I tend to support. COinS seem like a very useful microformat, nothing in RDFa, that I know of, is a decent substitute. What's happening here?

eReaders

Just curious any news of color e-ink readers from either ALA or CES?

Vocabulary Tool

Tematres 1.2 has been released.

TemaTres is an open source vocabulary
server, web application to manage and exploit vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies and formal representations of knowledge.... Export in any format: Skos-Core, Zthes, TopicMap, Dublin Core, MADS, BS8723-5, RSS, SiteMap, txt, SQL.