The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell has threatened to sue academic Julie Posetti for defamatory tweets she allegedly made about Mitchell, according to an ABC report.

Posetti was tweeting quotes from a journalism conference at Univeristy of Technology, Sydney, when she allegedly defamed Mitchell. Posetti was tweeting comments from the Australian’s former rural reporter when she wrote “Walhquist: ‘In the lead up to the election the Ed in Chief was increasingly telling me what to write.’ It was prescriptive”.

The Australian ran a story in which Mitchell rejected the allegation, saying “"Asa may or may not have said what the tweeter alleges. She denies to me that she did. But either way the allegations are a lie and Asa has admitted as much.”

Posetti commented briefly on her blog that she had “been asked not to comment further on the detail of what transpired until we know what allegations are being made against me and the University”.

Today Mitchell has again repeated his intention to sue in the Australian, saying “There is no protection from the law in repeating accurately allegations falsely made.”

Way back in January pundits were calling 2010 the Year of the e-reader. Over at Read Write Web, they think the year has lived up to that promise with the appearance of the Kindle, Sony e-reader and, who could forget, the iPad.

The article points out that the price war (that has seen the Kindle halve in price) has been a big influence in getting e-readers into more hands. This in turn meant that in the US e-book sales almost doubled between January and August of this year.

But while e-books have made big advances like social reading, the article concludes with five advantages of paper books including sharing, packaging and second-hand books.