San Diego deal pales next to Peoria price

The San Diego Union-Tribune probably sold for a fraction of the price fetched just two years ago by a group of papers its parent company peddled in places like Peoria.When the sale of the Union-Tribune was announced this week, owner Copley Press did not disclose the terms offered by the buyer, Platinum Equities, a private-equity firm in Beverly Hills that specializes in distressed

If you have a Sony Reader, you have a lot of reading to catch up on.

Sony EBook Store to present standard Books Digitized by Google.

How does it work?

Reader doesn’t have to replace your traditional books - it’s just a new way of enjoying reading. With Reader you can carry far more books with you wherever you go, so whatever mood takes you you’ll have a book that fits it.

And using Reader couldn’t be simpler:
When you buy a Reader, install the supplied software on your computer, connect Reader to it with the cable provided and voila!

Create and manage your eBook library on your PC and transfer your eBooks to Reader exactly like you do with your music on your mp3 player.

Need a new book? Choose from thousands of titles available from waterstones.com the online store of Britain's best-loved bookseller. Simply buy the ones you want and import them into your PC’s Reader library.
Store up to 160 books at a time on your Reader. If you’re a real bookworm add to your collection and store thousands more using a Sony Memory Stick Duo™ or SD memory card.

Bookmark pages or magnify text on a page; Reader will also remember where you last left off – even if you don’t.

It’s slim and light so you can take it with you wherever you go and the long battery life means you can enjoy nearly 7000 page turns without recharging – that’s like reading War and Peace five times over.

Sony Electronics has struck a deal with Google to distribute half a million titles through the Sony eBook Store -- for free.
The books, all published before 1923 and now in the public domain, were digitized by Google as part of its Google Book Search program. Sony will offer them alongside the 100,000 or so books still under copyright that it sells through its eBook store.
It's already possible to download public domain books from Google Book Search as PDF files and copy them onto a flash memory card for use in e-readers such as Sony's, but this partnership will simplify the process for users by integrating it into the eBook Library Software for PCs that ships with the Sony Reader.
The service won't give Reader owners free access to the much greater number of books still in copyright, many of which Google Book Search has already digitized, however.
To access the public domain books, owners of Sony's PRS-505 or PRS-700 readers will need to install the PC software and create an account on the eBook Store if they don't already have one. Owners of the older PRS-500 are out of luck, though: the service won't work with that device.
The expanded library won't address one key difference between the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle e-readers: the Amazon devices don't need to be tethered to a PC to download and install new books. Instead, the Kindles download books over the air via Sprint Nextel's 3G (third generation) mobile network. However, the wireless technology Amazon has chosen for the Kindle -- and the Kindle 2, released Feb. 9 -- is little used outside the U.S., and is incompatible with mobile networks in Europe and most of Asia.
That leaves an opening for other e-reader manufacturers to provide devices that work with European mobile networks, perhaps linking to other online bookstores. Dutch company Endless Ideas is planning just that with the next version of its BeBook e-reader. It showed a prototype of the device at Cebit, but the new model was absent from its small stand at the Paris Book Fair last week, where Sony had a major presence.
Google's partnership with Sony is not the first time it has simplified access to Google Book Search for mobile devices. On Feb. 6 it opened up the service to the Apple iPhone and to phones based on the Android software platform it backs.

Signs of life – and more cuts – in San Diego

The pending purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by a financially oriented buyer signals that at least one investor sees signs of life in newspapers. But some serious cost cutting likely lies ahead – perhaps even before the transaction closes.After some nine months on the market – an amount of time that would have been unthinkable for a trophy paper like this just a few years ago – the

The first step toward breaking racial barriers was taken when Barack Obama was elected president, Benjamin Chavis, Jr. told students at Boston University’s Howard Thurman Center Tuesday


By Lauren Metter
Published: February 11, 2009


Chavis, a former head of the NAACP and co-founder of the National Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, spoke as part of BU’s African-American studies program’s lecture series for Black History Month. . .

In 1995, Chavis organized the Million Man March in Washington D.C. with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. The march was aimed at encouraging black men to vote. After gaining the support of famous hip-hop artists, the march received massive global publicity. Six years later, Chavis and Simmons created the first National Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, the largest national coalition of hip-hop artists, youth activists and hip-hop leaders, Chavis said.

Chavis said he sees a “direct continuity” between what inspired young people in the civil rights movement and what moves them to action today in the hip-hop community. Hip-hop is a “global cultural phenomenon,” he said. . . . --NewsHammer 2/11/2009

Continue reading the Feb 11, 2009 article from Boston University's The Daily Free Press.

The first step toward breaking racial barriers was taken when Barack Obama was elected president, Benjamin Chavis, Jr. told students at Boston University’s Howard Thurman Center Tuesday


By Lauren Metter
Published: February 11, 2009


Chavis, a former head of the NAACP and co-founder of the National Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, spoke as part of BU’s African-American studies program’s lecture series for Black History Month. . .

In 1995, Chavis organized the Million Man March in Washington D.C. with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. The march was aimed at encouraging black men to vote. After gaining the support of famous hip-hop artists, the march received massive global publicity. Six years later, Chavis and Simmons created the first National Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, the largest national coalition of hip-hop artists, youth activists and hip-hop leaders, Chavis said.

Chavis said he sees a “direct continuity” between what inspired young people in the civil rights movement and what moves them to action today in the hip-hop community. Hip-hop is a “global cultural phenomenon,” he said. . . . --NewsHammer 2/11/2009

Continue reading the Feb 11, 2009 article from Boston University's The Daily Free Press.

Newspapers do matter, Princeton study finds

The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, the researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the

A bright light in Seattle, about to go out

Jon Hahn, a colleague at the Chicago Daily News, joined the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer when our paper closed in 1978. He retired as a columnist in 2003 to take up things like surf fishing, clam digging and felling trees. But he never stopped loving the paper that is closing with tomorrow's edition.By Jon HahnWhen I was transplanted here in 1978, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was a