Some people say it’ll take decades for us to completely jump from dead-tree books to reading long form fiction on computer screens – although Cory Doctorow takes a more evangelical opposite view. I’m inclined towards Cory’s position, myself – and the arrival of free open-source software that not only makes the on-screen experience more like a paperback book, but also acts as an interface with the Gutenberg Project library, suggests that other people are thinking the same way. Not convinced? Think back to how we used to mock people with mobile phones in the 80s … [LifeHacker]

It seems like only yesterday that astronomers started being able to spot planets around stars other than our own, by using advances in technology and technique to their advantage. According to Centauri Dreams, pretty soon we’ll be able to tell which extrasolar planets have oceans, too.

The New York Times has an article about the precious lesser-known documents and literary artifacts that may be lost forever if their curators decline to have them digitised – or just can’t afford to. While there’s plenty of argument on either side for scanning works still in copyright, it seems a shame that pieces of our world’s history and culture may become even more obscure than they currently are. [Print Is Dead]

There’s plenty of good science fiction appearing online for free these days – and not just here at Futurismic, either. This time it’s the turn of Technology Review (a damn fine tech-news website in its own right) to play host to ‘Osama Phone Home’, a new short story by David Marusek, author of Counting Heads, which was definitely one of the best novels of last year. [SFBC]

There’s nothing worse than mail-ordering some fresh new threads only to have them arrive and not fit you properly. Sony-Ericsson think this is another case for your increasingly-ubiquitous portable computing platform mobile phone; load in your measurements, scan the barcode on the clothes, and check the cut on a screen image of a virtual you wearing the virtual duds. Could this be the elusive killer app for Second Life?