This is just awesome. Courtesy of the Inside Google Book Search blog:

What if you could also access literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain’s hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

Read the rest of the post here. And point your mobile browser to  http://books.google.com/m for access to the books.

::SS::

There are a lot of ways to save and download YouTube videos but this is by far the best implementation I’ve seen.

Courtesy of PWN! YouTube:

Step 1: View a video on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 2: In the URL location box, type pwn in front of youtube, and enter (e.g. http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 3: Save out your video in either FLV or MP4.

Awesome stuff! Thanks to Leo Laporte for letting the Twitter world know about this.

::SS::

Courtesy of The New York Times:

The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the music labels blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the local government wants to embrace it — and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry’s help.

Read the rest here.

The nominal fee for broadband users discussed in the article sounds definitely like a step in the right direction. Lets hope other nations adopt this model, assuming of course it generates the requisite revenue for the labels and artists.

::SS::