More than 15 years ago Russian scientist Kirill Yeskov tried to settle certain geographical problems in Tolkien's fantasy world. One thing led to another, and he tackled a bigger project - what if we assumed that it's no less real than our world? His conclusion was that in such a case, the story of the Ring of Power is most likely a much-altered heroic retelling of a major war - but what was that war really about?

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I was impressed enough by this work to spend a few dozen lunch hours translating it to English. [...] I now offer this work for your perusal.

"They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."

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Cohn says this kind of page-view tracking may seem innocuous, but if the company keeps the data long-term, the information could be subpoenaed to check someone's alibi, or as evidence in a lawsuit.

And it's not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn't be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.

The following list combines the best of the online resources for DRM-free science fiction suggested by the BoingBoing community with the excellent “13 DRM-free ebook sites” resource by Mark Gladding at Text2Go Blog.

New Delhi - India's environment minister has linked the popularity of boy wizard Harry Potter to the widespread illegal trade in owls that threatens the birds in the country, news reports said Wednesday.

Jairam Ramesh said there was a 'strange fascination' among the affluent classes in India with giving owls to their children, inspired by the Harry Potter films and books that feature his feathered companion Hedwig, an IANS news agency report said.

Escape Pod is the premier science fiction podcast magazine. Every week we bring you short stories from some of today’s best science fiction stories, in convenient audio format for your computer or MP3 player.

We offer a quick way to compare the prices of any in-print and many out-of-print books at over a dozen online bookstores.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Den vetenskapliga analfabetismen är ett hot mot demokratin, anser författarna till »Unscientific America«.

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Författarna menar att USA drabbats av en ny sorts analfabetism. Flumläror tillåts härja fritt, stöttade av reaktionära krafter. Samtidigt dalar vetenskapsjournalistiken – och forskarna tiger.

Our Discussion Forum is the largest gathering of alternate history fans on the internet.

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Alternate history is the exercise of looking at the past and asking "what if"? What if some major historical event had gone differently, and how could that have changed the world? Popular "what if" questions that you may have seen in fiction include "what if the Nazis had won the Second World War?" and "what if the South had won the US Civil War?", but it can be just as interesting to think about Aztecs resisting Spanish colonization or a Japan that did not turn its back on the world under the Shogunate. Alternate history is a literary genre, but here we're mainly interested in history itself - and the politics, strategy, culture, and more that define it. We spend most of our time debating our own ideas about history and how it could have gone differently, so this is a community focused on creativity and learning.

The Assayer is the web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free. Users can also submit reviews. The site has been around since 2000, and is a particularly good place to find free books about math, science, and computers. If you're looking for old books that have fallen into the public domain, you're more likely to find what you want at Project Gutenberg.