Here's a piece from the Washington Post reminding us Americans how much our Internet services suck. They are slow and expensive, and greedy cable companies are hindering innovation with their fight against Net neutrality. In Japan, for the most part, the opposite is true. Faster speeds and a stronger government hand in promoting competition is quickly turning Japan into a hub of Internet innovation.

Thanks to Ross for passing along this riveting video from the TED conference. It's an eloquent reminder that we're living amid revolutionary changes in technology.

A former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune has some big plans, according to The New York Times:

Joel Kramer, the former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, is expected today to announce plans for an online, nonprofit daily newspaper for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the country’s 14th largest media market.

A nonprofit. That's very encouraging. Here's the rest of the story.

If you missed the defensive, uninformed piece in the LA Times this Sunday about blogging, you didn't miss much — just more of the same nostalgia for the good old days and whining about how bloggers are all hobbyists who don't bother to report.

But this response by an NYU j-school prof is spirited. Check it out.

It's telling that the first piece contained almost no reporting, just one professor's opinion and a few facts that anyone could find on Google. This is, of course, what the writer is accusing bloggers of doing.

The response, on the other hand, is well-researched and illuminating. A couple of the blogs it mentioned I had yet to discover. I'm looking forward to checking them out.

One in four Americans didn't read a book in the past year. Southerners read more than Northerners. Democrats read more than Republicans. And people who don't go to church read twice as much as those who do. Check out this Associated Press article for more tidbits on American reading habits.

Here's some promising news:

Truthdig, winner of the 2007 Webby Award for Best Political Blog, is pleased to announce the appointment of Steve Wasserman as book editor. A former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Wasserman will inaugurate Truthdig's weekly book review, starting in October 2007.

Books, despite predictions of their demise, are alive and flourishing. Ten years ago, some 50,000 books were published annually in America. Today, more than three times that number are published, yet review coverage in the mainstream media shrinks. Truthdig seeks to reverse that trend.

Book coverage on Truthdig will complement its political emphasis by deepening public debate on a range of compelling issues. Such coverage will embrace the enduring need for serious and lively analysis so necessary in an increasingly dizzy culture. The fundamental idea at stake is the self-image of society: how America reasons with itself, describes itself, imagines itself. Nothing in the acceleration made possible by the digital revolution banishes the need for the rigor such self-reckoning requires. In its reviews, Truthdig will focus on what matters.

As newspapers continue to drop the ball because of obsession with the bottom line, Truthdig and others are filling the void. The digital shift is not about amateurs on the Net, as some would have us believe, but about writers/artists/musicians looking for new avenues when the corporate world provides so few. The exciting and daunting thing is that this is all still in the nascent stages and nobody knows exactly what will emerge to replace traditional print criticism.

Cellphone novels — stories that are serialized and delivered in short installments to phone screens — have become big business in Japan. Publishers of these digital novels have found that they sell like mad to teenagers and twentysomething readers. Akai Ito (The Red Thread), a two-volume set by Mei, is leading the back, with more than one million copies sold this year. It has come out in print form and retails for about $9. This article claims that 3 million copies of cellphone novels have been sold in 2007 (or at least that's what I assume the English means).

Most of the cellphone novels so far seem to be romantic tales aimed at teenage girls.

The New York Times picks up on the theme of working women in Japan and the many obstacles to equality they still face:

“Birthrates here are declining because of a lack of equality for women,” said Ms. Inoguchi, the former minister. “The population shortage is forcing a change in attitudes.”

That's a great point: That lack of equality in the workplace is keeping the population artificially low. But entrenched ideas about women and sex are slow to die in Japan, as Sumie Kawakami has chronicled beautifully in the pages of Goodbye Madame Butterfly, copies of which are rushing across the Pacific in Seattle-bound containers as I write. She shows how men (and some women) are loathe to give up the status quo, even when that status quo leaves you no room to build your self-esteem. Yes, change is coming to Japan, but it is coming at a snail's pace and at the expense of many intelligent women who would be climbing the corporate ladder and having more children in a more egalitarian, balanced society.

Here's a thoughtful piece on the role of literary blogs in the larger world of literature. It pretty much concludes where you would expect a book reviewer writing for a major newspaper to conclude: He says we still need the gatekeepers. But he's given the subject some deep thought, obviously, which makes this piece better than the typically dismissive news coverage of lit blogs.

Still, I'm afraid Mr. Birkerts is fighting an uphill battle in calling for more intelligent reviewing in print publications. I love good reviews and good criticism — they enlighten readers and make books more enjoyable. But the future of both reviewing and criticism is clearly online, not in print. And that's not because of the lit blogs or the Internet, necessarily; it's because of media consolidation. Today's newspaper stewards don't have time for anything as high-minded as book reviews. But the lit blogs do. Maybe Mr. Birkerts can just help us make those lit blogs even better.