But now comes word from BusinessWeek that Sony will also sell e-books elsewhere—in the new Sony Online Store, the current name.

This one will sell music, movies and downloadable apps, too. The feeling among Sony watchers is that the new Sony store will use an iTune-ish approach.No startup date has been announced. 

I’m curious if or how the new Sony store may works with the existing eBook Library software. What’s more, might the current eBookStore vanish? I don’t think so, but who knows?

Is Sony in time going to do the e-book-capable multimedia table that Apple is supposed to offer us? That certainly would jibe well with Sony’s history as a hardware company and the store’s multimedia approach. I’m just extrapolating and guessing. But if you work for a publisher and need to anticipate future possibilities, add this one to the brew.

Also, what e-book format will the new Sony store use? ePub? And what about the DRM situation? Will Adobe-DRMed ePub be the norm? And what if publishers don’t want DRM? Will Sony in fact offer publishers a choice, as I believe it’s indicated?

Apple has backed off from DRM in the real iTunes Store, at least when it comes to music (it is selling “protected” books in the ScrollMotion format). Sony should do the same with e-books.

Perhaps social DRM could be a compromise. I’ll query Sony to see if it has any word on the DRM and format issues and other book-specific details.

Related: Techmeme roundup and Google News roundup.

It seems that Condé Nast has decided that the Apple Tablet will, in fact, exist—and is creating a version of Wired Magazine for use on such a tablet.

Condé Nast  is telling Apple exactly what it’s doing. But Apple is still not telling anybody whether the company is eplanning a tablet, let alone what software it will support.

What’s more, the planned version of Wired will run on Adobe AIR—which is not even available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. So if the Apple Tablet runs the iPhone OS as some are expecting, it won’t even work to begin with!

(Not that a special version is actually even needed—Wired offers its content via RSS, which means it can be read by a number of solutions that already work on the iPhone—Stanza or NetNewsWire, to name just two.)

Of course, some of the tablets under consideration by various companies probably will run AIR, so the effort may not entirely be wasted. But it still seems a trifle premature to make plans for a hardware platform that may end up vaporware.

Adding to the fun, there’s talk of an OLED model of the Apple Tablet with 9.7-inch screen (see video of rival OLED tech from Sony).

We’ve known for a long time that a lot more people read e-books on multi-purpose than dedicated devices—they’re cheaper, they do more, they’re easier to pocket.

And more people have them. It is estimated 1.7 million people own a dedicated e-reader, and that number may rise to 4 million by the end of the holidays. But Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches.

“The iPod Touch is always at hand,” Shannon Stacey, who has written several romance e-novels, said. “It’s my calendar, it’s my everything, so my books are always with me.” Ms. Stacey, who also owns an early Sony Reader model, said she had now bought twice as many e-books for her iPod Touch as for her Sony.

But others are still dubious:

“The Kindle is for people who love to read,” [Ian Freed, vice president for the Kindle division at Amazon] said. “People use phones for lots of things. Most often they use them to make phone calls. Second most often, they use them to send text messages or e-mail. Way down on the list, there’s reading.”

Of course, we know that people who read e-books have been in love with their small screens for more than ten years. E-books were one of the first big “killer app” uses for the Palm, and e-book vendors eReader and Fictionwise have been in business ever since.

Some have even gone so far as to predict “the end of single-purpose devices,” but that is probably still premature.

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

Of course, nobody yet knows how much it is going to cost, or exactly how big it will be, or exactly what features it will include, or even when (if) it will come out. There sure is a lot of guessing, though!

Although I have found e-ink to be gratifyingly clear and easy to read in good light, I have to admit that a clipboard-sized version of my iPod Touch with appropriate resolution is something I would find very appealing for a variety of uses—especially e-reading uses.

The issue from my perspective is not whether an e-book of Mein Kampf should be allowed. In the United States, freedom of speech is an important part of our Constitution, even if it’s not speech we like—and more importantly, this book should be kept available as an example of true evil so we know what kinds of things to guard against. (In fact, you can find it in a number of places even now, including Project Gutenberg.)

In fact, the issue is that Apple serves as a gatekeeper for its store, filtering out controversial applications (such as an e-book reader that could download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg). They certainly have the right to do so; it is their store, after all.

But if they are going to enforce standards of decency, they should at least enforce them consistently. Things like this keep on slipping by them. As TechCrunch put it, “If the Nazi logo didn’t raise a red flag, I’m not sure what will."

On the other hand, there are only 40 employees to review the thousands upon thousands of applications Apple receives. With so little manpower, perhaps the occasional lapse should not be surprising.

When I loaded up the appbook’s listing on iTunes, the first two words to catch my eye from the app’s blurb were “Random House”. At which point I said, “Ahh,” and was no longer surprised. Random House has always led the pack on ridiculous e-book pricing.

That said, the same book on Fictionwise is $40 less $12 store-credit rebate, so “only” $28 (or $23.80 if you subscribe to FW’s discount program). And it is $32 on the Kindle (and hence one of those rare e-books that Amazon actually does not have cheaper than everybody else). That is still a ridiculous rate for an e-book, however. Random House really needs to get its act together.

From August 2008 to August 2009, games was the category with the biggest number of releases, causing a drop in Nintendo’s revenues as people migrated to the iPhone and iPod Touch as a portable gaming platform. Now Malik thinks that the iPhone will also give the Kindle a run for its money. (Though I think he’s a little late in noticing this, given how it already has been for the last few years.)

Nonetheless, even after observing this swing from games to e-books, Malik thinks that dedicated e-readers will stick around “mostly because it is impossible to read large amounts of text on a smaller screen.” The fact that, as Malik himself reported, e-book apps are now the biggest category of app would seem to suggest not everyone agrees.

No matter what, a tablet for video could still be great for book reading. What’s more, books could still be part of Apple’s long-term vision. It could let Amazon and Google and others duke it out first. Then it could swoop in with its own major efforts.

Image: It’s Piper Jaffray’s conception of the tablet.

The Herald says that Apple has sent actual specs of the device to the Media but they are being kept close to the vest. As the Herald points out, the Kindle flopped with Australian media because Amazon wanted 70% of the revenue. The paper reports that Apple’s model is just the reverse, keep 30% and give media 70%. No timing has been released.

Thanks to Chris Bates for the link.

We all know how reliable these Apple rumors are, so take it for what it’s worth. Thanks to Benn Kobb for the link.

According to an interview in the Cult of Mac:

CoM: Did you see Gizmodo’s story onWednesday about Apple talking to publishers about the upcoming tablet?

Collingridge: I saw the piece, yes, but IMHO it didn’t break any great news. There have been lots of rumours on my radar and yours about Apple talking to (book) publishers for a relatively long time, but very little evidence of a genuine and aggressive entry into books that I think is credible, sadly.

Perhaps they’ve been dipping their toes into the water of print. There have been equally many rumours suggesting that the contractual machinations of publishing deals make the music industry look simple to Apple. But – the examples cited in the Gizmodo piece are fairly dated – a lot has happened since February. Or perhaps nothing!

Thanks to Nathaniel Hoffelder for the link. For Kat Meyer’s interview with Peter you can go here.

A recent article from Advertising Age discusses this conundrum facing the publishers:

They saw how Apple dictated music prices on iTunes, where for a long time the world learned that every song was worth 99 cents, no less and no more. And they’ve watched Amazon exert total control over the magazine and newspaper subscriptions it sells on the Kindle, refusing to provide publishers any information about their own subscribers through the Kindle Store.

Retaining control over pricing and customer information is vital to the magazine industry, the article says, and evidently some consideration is being given to creating an industry storefront that could live on various ereading platforms.

Alas, however, you can’t type on a tablet easily. Virtual keyboards aren’t that great.

But recently patented technology from Apple could help.

AppleInsider says Apple has “again disclosed plans for a multi-touch surface that could accommodate two full hands and distinguish between palms and individual fingers for typing, gestures and more.”

Will these improved virtual keyboards be as easy to use as traditional ones? I won’t bet on it. Still, Apple’s technology could be a major improvement.

Related: Google news roundup on the ramifications of the Apple tablet for printed media, including newspapers such as the New York Times (thanks to David Faucheux for the latter link).

Image: From promo for Gizmodo’s Apple tablet Photoshop contest. Notice the date of the accompanying post?  November 8, 2007. Yep, speculation about the Apple tab has been going on forever.

That’s in league with forecasting the debut date of the big Apple tablet.

Still, ever-game, our friends at the Bookseller are saying Amazon will make an announcement next week if a source is right. Fodder for the Frankfurt Book Fair?

Also see GalleyCat writeup.

Photo is of a fair-related exhibition hall in Frankfurt—our little attempt to spare you another Kindle shot.

Update, 11:18 a.m.: Just found out that Paul used a Frankfurt shot in the post before this one. Jeez. Can’t win. We’ll leave ‘em both up in honor of the Fair.