http://www.accessiblebookcollection.org/. - "The Accessible Book Collection is a non-profit corporation. Our primary mission is to provide high interest/low reading level digital text to qualified persons with disabilities. Government and non-profit schools and others can subscribe to the Accessible Book Collection and have a large selection of e-books for all their eligible students for one low price. ($49.95 per year)" (Thanks Joe for the submission)

LS Thoughts - I have no time to see how this works, so I can't tout its usefulness or uselessness. Looks kinds cool though. [Library Stuff]

Video on Demand Is Finally Taking Hold

"After years of failed promises, unripe business plans and half-baked technology, the cable industry is finally beginning to deliver reliable and economical video-on-demand services.

Want to watch an episode of "Sex and the City" from last month? Punch a few buttons and sit back as the program begins when you want it to. Phone ringing? Hit pause on the remote, and the program will freeze. Miss a line? Press rewind. Bored? Choose from hundreds of other films, series and specials — none of which requires you to record it ahead of time.

Video on demand reached a significant milestone recently, when Time Warner Cable announced that by the end of the year the service would be available throughout the company's biggest market, New York City, where it has 1.2 million subscribers.

Besides Time Warner Cable, owned by AOL Time Warner, other big companies now offering video on demand around the nation include Comcast and Cablevision. The Yankee Group, a technology research firm, estimates that by the end of this year about seven million homes around the nation will have access to video on demand, up from only about three million at the end of 2001.

Despite the omnipotence that the label implies, video on demand does not allow users to watch any program or movie under the sun. No database is yet infinite. But in New York City, for instance, Time Warner Cable plans to have 1,300 hours of programming available at any one time — the equivalent of almost two months of TV watching." [New York Times]

This is another form of The Heavenly Jukebox, where the middleman is cut out of the process, the product never ships in a box, and the sale goes directly to the consumer. In this case, the middlemen are video rental/distribution channels like BlockBuster, Best Buy, and libraries. There is no mechanism here for a library to circulate a video over the Time Warner network (in part because there is no way for a library to logistically circulate a digital video file at this point in time).