ReadWriteWeb

The British painter and video artist "Stanza," has spent a couple of decades traveling around the world. Every place he'd stop, he'd grab audio tape (then digital recordings) of the sounds of that place. In 2000, he started posting sound-maps online and in 2004 he made the database available. Now, Soundcities is an extensive, open-source sound and mapping site that users can freely take from and contribute to. There are even on-site mixing decks to allow anyone with a computer to remix the world.

I first came across the site only today, when an old friend, the perennial exile activist and writer Sokari Ekine, tweeted a blog post on the site, which she'd been using as an antidote to living in Florida. (My words, not hers.)

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, a popular eBook reader for the iPhone, just announced that it has been acquired by Amazon. Amazon, of course, also just released Kindle for iPhone, which is now one of the most popular mobile eBook readers. According to Lexcycle, the company does not plan to make any changes to the Stanza app or user experience because of this acquisition, and Lexcycle will continue its relationships with its content partners. Neither Stanza nor Amazon disclosed the price of the acquisition.

Adobe and Lexcycle, the company behind the popular Stanza eBook application, announced today that they are working together with the Internet Archive on turning the Stanza online catalog system into an open standard for distributing free and commercial eBooks. This new standard, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), will be built on top of Atom, and aims to create an open standard for distributed online catalogs for electronic books.

It is only Tuesday, but it has already been a good week for eBook fans. Yesterday, Amazon released the newest version of its Kindle eBook reader, and today, O'Reilly announced that it will now host Bookworm, a popular open source eBook reader and management system, as part of its O'Reilly Labs. O'Reilly wants to position Bookworm, which is built on open standards and frameworks, as an alternative to proprietary eBook management and reading systems like Adobe's Digital Editions and Sony's eBook Library Software.