Internet Archive director and co-founder Brewster Kahle made the announcement at the end of a presentation about the organization’s philosophy of open e-book publishing. OLPC being local, it was a hot story—and thankfully, the Boston Public Library has excellent, free Wi-Fi , so I was able to file a story right from the auditorium. (Which reminded me of another OLPC-related scoop that I filed live from an auditorium, on the unveiling of the foundation’s second-generation laptop design. That one brought Xconomy a huge amount of traffic after it got Slashdotted.)

The e-book session was hosted by prolific New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. I got a chance to meet Pogue in person after the event, and was impressed (as always) by his friendly, extroverted, at times hyperkinetic demeanor.

Pogue took a moment from the e-book session to perform a little musical number parodying Steve Jobs and Apple, and I’ve included my video of the performance below. The enigmatic company is rumored to be working on a tablet-sized device that could become a competitor for existing e-book reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Pogue said that as far as he was concerned, the Apple tablet is still just a rumor—but he couldn’t resist using the occasion of the panel to do a rendition of a song he once wrote about Jobs’ departure from, and return to, Apple in the 1990s.

[Update, 10/30/09: My full writeup of the Boston Book Festival session, including material from an interview with Sony Reader president Steve Haber, is up on Xconomy -- see "Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books."]