I am perplexed by equating "e-learning" with "give every kid an iPad". If you give a kid a screen and make it under their control they will find the games. If someone is unaware of this, they probably dont have kids. But this is not unique to electronics. If you give them a stack of text books and no supervision, they'll make paper airplanes. Education requires supervision at that age. Putting an e- in front of things doesn't change human nature.

I avoided getting a smart phone for a long time, even though I'm surrounded by people with smart phones, because I knew that as soon as I had one it would become indispensable, just like my Visor did, and my Palm, and my iPod, and ... so on.

Now, I have an iPhone, and it's indispensable. Sure, I could manage without it, but I use it all day, every day, and I feel I would be lost without it. And while I know that's an illusion, I also know how my brain works. ... which is why I don't have an iPad yet ...

It's fascinating what autocorrect can come up with. An employee of THE PARENT COMPANY. Sheesh.

No, it's just there to indicate that I'm an employee of a discount company, and therefore anything I say can be discounted as simply kowtowing to my corporate overlords. Or something like that.

However, I'm involved in the LiteracyBridge project (documentation) and the founder of it, Cliff Schmidt, is a long-time colleague at the Apache Software Foundation, and one of my heroes.

Www.LiteracyBridge.org - effective use of technology to make life better for real people. Worth your time (they're open source) and money.

I know folks who go to the hospital for that and things even more trivial. Like - I am not making this up - heartburn. For me I have to be just about dying before I go to the ER and wait 4 hours to be told to go home and rest and drink plenty of fluids.

They have exclusive for 90 days. That's all. After that, you can do what you like. 90 days isn't very long.

With a traditional publisher, you typically have an exclusive contract for a much longer time, but of course you can sell the resulting book in any venue.

Note that Stephen King (perhaps you've heard of him) released the book Ur exclusively on the Kindle. Granted, it's *about* the Kindle, so that sort of made sense.

Then, the 90 day exclusivity clause ran out, and it was re-released on paper, and did quite well there, too.

Having gone both ways I think I can answer this.

1. Editing services
2. Typesetting and layout
3. Marketing

Most authors, even good ones, need these and don't do them well themselves.

Most folks can figure out the first to but it's very hard to market a book yourself, especially for a first book.

Also, the "for at least 90 days" in the program description, left out of the summary, rather changes the risk level quite a bit.

I have not read anything by the authors mentioned but I bet their books are not of the scope of yours. I'm guessing 100-200 pages of light reading fiction, not carefully researched tech books, written at the rate of several a year.

My publishers don't give me stats that distinguish what ebook readers are purchasing my books, so I really don't know what percentage the kindle accounts for. However I also have a few Kindle books (ie exclusively Kindle) and they aren't exactly flying off the (virtual) shelves.

I would guess that with the Amazon marketing machine working for you, any book is going to sell better than without it. I expect that would be strong enough incentive to be willing to experiment with a book or two.

Here's a little more information from our legal folks:

A: Earlier this year, we went through a pretty robust process to receive our Truste certification which covers privacy, security and safe harbor (our privacy policy is located at ADD LINK). We are continuing to look for ways to improve our security controls and protect user personal information. We did fully disclose an incident early in 2001 and the details and what we did about can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-attack-full-report/

They also recommended that I point you to our corporate privacy policy, here: http://geek.net/privacy-statement

Yeah, on calm reflection later, I always come back to that conclusion myself. When I'm wallowing in the petri dish with my stack of forms, I want to be able to tell them to go look it up.

It's equally annoying when I have to fill out a form when crossing the border, so that a customs agent can compare what I wrote down with what's in my passport and then toss the form in a heap. What happens with all those forms?

I've long thought that government software should be software of the people, by the people, for the people (to be a little over-poetic). If I pay for the development of software that's used to run, say, the TSA, then I should have access to that code. And if the IRS is using software to store my data, I should have access to that code so that I can verify that it's secure, and is calculating my tax refund correctly.

I'm not sure, as a non-lawyer who has never worked as a government contractor, whether such demands are at all realistic or probable, but I still think it's worth making the demands. While I'm confident that *my* congress critter didn't understand the letter I sent him on the subject (at least, based on his content-free response), I would encourage you to contact yours, and maybe there's one out there that would understand.

The medical data issue is a little less clear-cut, depending on whether medecine is socialized in your particular country.

Putting medical data in a shared data pool *promises* big things, certainly.

Every time I go to a doctor's office and have to fill out all the same data, yet again, or when I have to fill out yet another government form with all the same information that they already have, often two or three times on the same set of forms, I think, why, in 2011, do I have to fill out these forms at all, when they already have so much information on me that should be readily accessible? A retinal scan, or even an ID number, should be sufficient to avoid this. Why haven't we solved this problem yet? (Yes, that's a very naive position, largely inspired by the frustration of filling out the 8th form while other peoples' kids run around screaming and sneezing on me.)

But who do we trust to be that central repository of data, and not sell it to the highest bidder?