This year will probably be remembered (among other things!) as the year of the e-book-reader device hype. We've seen new Kindles, the B&N Nook, the FBReader, applications for book reading on iPhones and other handheld devices, and more. And, of course, there is the elephant-in-the-room of the Google book scanning project. (I find it so odd that so much of the popular press refers to the Google "Library" when it is clearly a Google book store.)

It will be a while before we know if the digital age will turn into the end of sharable books (see: Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books), but we certainly should be tracking the development of the advantages and disadvantages of e-books and e-book readers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping us track how these developments affect privacy:

• An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, Commentary by Ed Bayley.

EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy. We've examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share.