As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce and Palm veteran as CEO over its entire operation.

Since the JooJoo has been delayed,

Another delayed e-book device, the Spring Design Alex, began taking pre-orders yesterday for $399, according to CrunchGear. The Alex somewhat resembles the Nook in form factor, save that the LCD screen is a full 3.5” touchscreen display rather than the Nook’s small rectangle.

To the Alex’s credit, the Android-based device will allow a lot more interactivity over the web than most other e-book readers, including websurfing, watching videos, and online communication. It even has a micro SD card slot and USB 2.0, and supports Adobe ADEPT DRM.

But on the other hand, you’re only going to be reading from one display at once—so at any given time, either 1/3 or 2/3 of the device’s screen real estate is going to be useless to you. That extra screen real estate makes the Alex a bit unwieldy—like a Kindle DX with less readable screen area. And honestly, it seems a little expensive for what you get—just $100 more will get you an iPad.

Samsung has announced it is going to come out with an Atom-based slate PC platform in the second half of the year. Samsung execs stated that the device would be more powerful than the iPad, being a full-fledged PC with a slate form factor rather than just a media and web tablet.

Meanwhile, Samsung is also releasing four e-ink based e-book devices in Australia, ranging in screen size from 5” to 9.7”. Device features will include wifi, access to Google Books, and a QWERTY thumb board on one model. Versions of the devices released in the USA will have access to Barnes & Noble’s e-book store along with the Nook; there is no word on when or which of these devices will come to American shores, however.

Gizmodo also reports on an apparent new iPhone app strategy from publishing conglomerate Hearst—they are releasing a series of $1.99 apps built on a template, which act as content aggregators, drawing together photos and news stories from around the web on a given subject (such as Green Day or Angelina Jolie). Gizmodo compares this to the strategy used by banned appmaker Perfect Acumen, which also “charge[d] people for other people’s content.”

It does seem odd that they are doing this in the wake of Apple’s plan to crack down on templated apps—not to mention a bit ironic given how another megapublisher, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, is complaining about Google profiteering on other peoples’ content.

Apple has hired Richard DeVaul, a “wearable computing” expert, as its new senior prototype scientist, says Ars Technica. DeVaul’s dissertation involved a form of augmented-reality glasses, which could use GPS and accelerometer data to assist in providing information. Since then, the company he co-founded, AWare Technologies, has created an iPhone fitness tracking application.

DeVaul’s employment provides some tantalizing glimpses at the direction that Apple’s next mobile device developments might take. Might we eventually plug a pair of “iGlasses” into our iPhone and view augmented reality that way, rather than through the device itself? Might we be able to read an e-book on our glasses rather than a handheld screen? This opens up some very interesting possibilities.

For that matter, we might eventually be projecting e-books on our wall. Apple recently filed a patent covering projector systems, possibly with an eye toward integrating picoprojectors into future versions of existing devices—laptops, AirPort hubs, maybe even iPhones. Nice to know Apple plans to continue innovating.

Speaking at a media summit event,

It’s good to hear that Condé Nast is more clueful about building an audience in the new media than some other publishing conglomerates—though given that they publish both Wired and Ars Technica, this is hardly a surprise.

Speaking of building an audience, journalist Scott Kirsner’s 2009 book Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age is available as a free PDF download for the duration of the South by Southwest conference—a $12 value.

Qualcomm has submitted a patent for a unique-looking folding device made up of three rectangular panels hinged together in an “n” shape. The idea is that, opened flat, it forms a wide tablet-type display—but folded up, it has a smartphone form factor. (It can apparently also be partially folded in a variety of configurations, including an alarm clock.)

Seems like it might be a bit flimsy, and the cracks between the panes might be distracting while watching a video—but if these disadvantages can be overcome, it might just combine the best of both worlds. Assuming it actually gets built, rather than merely remaining a patent concept.

Michael Arrington is bemused to see that Barnes & Noble has taken note of TechCrunch’s “Crunchies” award, which was bestowed upon the Nook for Best New Gadget of 2009. Mention of the award is featured prominently in great big letters on the newest in-store Nook advertising poster. Arrington is asking if anyone can get TechCrunch one of said posters.

Ron Burkle is trying to buy up enough B&N stock to become the largest single shareholder, and Barnes & Noble’s board has adopted a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan to try to fend off the takeover. Meanwhile, store sales have declined for the last 15 months. Even though online sales increased by 32%, that has not been enough to keep profits from declining.

But apparently the fact that Burkle is interested in the company at all means that he expects its prospects to improve. The article notes Burkle has been seen to follow a classic “buy low, sell high” strategy, buying “reputable-but-troubled companies” cheaply and selling after they’ve turned around.

And Barnes & Noble seems to agree, at least regarding its prospects for improvement:

“Physical books and bookstores will continue to be a very important part of this big industry,” said William Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble.com. “Anyone that says the physical book business is going away is just not paying attention or just doesn’t know much about the industry.”

Brave talk, or industry expertise? Regardless, Barnes & Noble continues to expand its e-book business, with a recent announcement that it will have a version of its eReader available for the iPad at around the time of device’s launch. If the iPad sells as well as people expect, it could be a big boost for the fortunes of any company with iPad-compatible e-book applications.

B&N has confirmed that they will be adding a reader app to the iPad. According to their website the app will give readers access to the ebooks, magazines and newspapers in their bookstore as well as to existing content in readers’ digital library (including content that was downloaded to the Nook). The app will be released “around the time of the iPad’s expected availability”.

Full release here. Thanks to Aaron Pressman for the heads up.

Gizmodo

The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa.

And don’t expect that DRM to be going away any time soon:

You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will rage with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at leasttry to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?

It also explains why every device except the Kindle reads EPUB, and the way the Kindle’s Mobipocket-based formats and Barnes & Noble’s eReader-based format hark back to PDA legacy formats.

I found it particularly interesting that the article complained about the chance of getting an eReader-format book when you want an EPUB-format one, given that we carried a story about someone in exactly the opposite situation.

The article concludes with the suggestion that creating custom apps to contain books might be the way to go. (I’m not entirely sure whether it’s talking about appbooks, or just individual apps from specific publishers.)

One amusing note: at the end, the article suggests that scanned-comic piracy will “explode” when the iPad comes out, now that a good screen will exist for reading those colored pages.

I suspect that Buchanan probably has not checked out the Internet comic piracy scene lately, given that it is possible to find just about any comic you want on BitTorrent already. But just wait—as soon as the iPad comes out, I’ll bet you that even though the amount of it does not change much, everybody will be Macaulay Culkin-faceslapping in horror how much of a Problem it suddenly is.

I don’t agree with everything the article has to say, but it makes a good primer on the “Tower of E-Babel” problem. Worth a look.

Peter Kafka at the “MediaMemo” section of AllThingsD

Samsung’s E-6 e-reader will be coming this spring to Barnes & Noble at a list price of $299 (down from an original $399), report Engadget and Gizmodo. It is unclear whether they are just going to be sold in Barnes & Noble stores, will hook into the B&N on-line store the way the Nook does, or both. It is also unclear why anyone would buy one rather than the more featureful, less costly Nook.

A press release from book-industry collaboration software provider Above the Treeline notes that the company is partnering with BookExpo America to create an online catalog of new titles being exhibited at the next BEA (to be held in New York City May 25-27). The press release does not really make clear whether it is talking about e-books or print books.

We mentioned Above the Treeline partnering with Firebrand Technologies on a digital galley distribution service back in December.

Here’s another “burn the boats” recommendation from Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, who notes that “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the Internet.”  However, Varian adds, newspapers historically have not made much ad revenue from their news, but rather from special-interest sections—and on the web, there are already a lot of websites that cater to those special interests.

See also this comprehensive post by Varian on Google’s Public Policy Blog.

Meanwhile, marketing exec Maurice Levy says that newspapers are overly dependent on advertising and must wean themselves off of it to survive. He suggests a mixture of free and subscriber-only content.

Nate the Great at Nate’s Ebook News reports that an additional 31 CliffsNotes appbooks are now available in the app store, bringing the total to 36 altogether. The CliffsNotes for Romeo and Juliet can be downloaded free until March 15th.

SmashWords is getting smashed

AllThingsD’s “MediaMemo” section reports that Barnes & Noble has hired Time’s Jonathan Shar to head up its "Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble.com" division. Shar is a 15-year veteran with both print and digital experience. B&N could probably have done a better job coming up with a department name, though.

The New York Times is planning to spin off its Book Review section as a separate e-publication for e-readers, New York Times Marketing Director James Dunn said today at a journalism symposium in Columbia, Missouri. Within the next few weeks, it will be published first for Sony, then for Kindle, and Nook e-readers. Dunn said that the paper would be looking at other sections to see what might best be spun off as further separate publications.

It seems that a Stanford survey has determined iPhones may be “addictive”—essentially by asking people, “Hey, do you think you’re addicted?” I’m not entirely sure I find that methodology convincing. Still, the convenience of always having something to read in my pocket is hard to deny.

The EFF has managed to obtain a copy of the license that must be signed by iPhone app developers. Since “the first rule of App Club is you don’t talk about App Club,” they had to file a Freedom Of Information Act request with NASA in order to look at it without agreeing to abide by it.

Fred von Lohmann reports that the license is extremely restrictive and one-sided in Apple’s favor—no surprises there. But it’s the rules of the road if you want a piece of the 40-million-iPhoneOS-device pie.

Certainly a number of people have talked about wanting to get both versions of the book at once. Sometimes people who buy the print book will then go ahead and pirate the e-book, reasoning that they have paid for ownership of the book so snagging an e-copy of it to read on an e-book device is tantamount to ripping a CD into mp3s to play on their iPod.

But from the article, it does not sound as if B&N is truly planning what people usually think of as “bundling”—you will have to pay some extra money for the e-book version. Given that the e-book version has no marginal cost to produce, I expect e-book fans will still express disappointment that this offer does not go far enough.

The article also mentions the possibility of putting print-on-demand machines into larger Barnes & Noble bookstores, something we have discussed before in regard to the Espresso device.

But it turns out that Barnes & Noble is not the only retailer experimenting with e-book sales in physical bookstores. Publishing Perspectives has a brief piece on German e-book vendor Libri.de. Libri is putting software into bookstores that will let customers order books, pay for them in the store, then receive a link to the books via e-mail. Another German e-book service, Libreka, allows purchasing e-books in-store and saving them directly to a USB stick.

Rupert Murdoch has confirmed

From Nate’s Ebook News comes word that Opera has updated its e-book reader widget. Only reads DRM-free EPUB, but Nate seemed to find it a decent reading experience.

The EFF has updated “Unintended Consequences”, its annual “__ years under the DMCA” whitepaper. The time count now stands at 12, and the paper piles up ever more cases of abuses of process’s chilling effects on free speech, scientific research, competition, and innovation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

MacRumors has found an Apple job posting for a manager for an “Asia Pacific & Canada” iBooks division. A number of other jobs postings are mentioned, too, including account managers.

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog reports that the iPhone news-reading app Instapaper Pro has updated to version 2.2, with a number of new features including an option for page-turning rather than scrolling, dictionary lookup, and an in-app browser. I use Instapaper quite a lot and find it really handy; the new features are great!

Engadget has a couple of posts about some new Internet tablets coming out from Archos. The Archos Home Slates are 7” and 8” LCD tablets that are meant for home/family use. With only 2 GB of on-board storage, they seem to be pretty clearly meant for surfing and viewing on-line movies while connected to the Internet. However, depending on what apps are available, they could also make decent e-readers; after all, you could still fit quite a number of e-books into 2 gigabytes.

Here’s a hilarious review of the Nook, “The Real Man’s Electronic Reader,” from The Faster Times. Don’t miss it.

I visited the Nook counter with my boyfriend, John, who, most decidedly, is not a wimpy hipster. He does not own any packaged action figures or keep books about post-modern tree houses on his coffee table. He’s a man. He likes man things. Things like fire and loving deeply. His job includes math, blueprints, and a welder’s helmet. I say all this to explain that John – who has very little need to bring a Nook on his morning commute – thought the Nook was cool. If I got him a Nook, he would use it. That way, he could carry around his whole library:Rebuilding Engines Up Your Asshole, Hammer Fight Sex Lumberjack, and I Will Kill Bad Guys To Save This Kitten. Then he’d find a way to drag race with it

A Game-Changing Event

Yesterday, Valve updated the popular Portal first-person puzzle game with a rather cryptic patch that simply said “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.”

I simply thought this referred to the clock radio object in the game that is playing a cheerful tune when your character first wakes up. I remembered it having an unrealistic frequency on the dial, and figured maybe they patched to fix the art.

But it didn’t take very long for more industrious fans on Valve’s community forums to notice that there were now new “radio” objects planted at various locations in the game, and they included audio files with a series of images encoded in them. Apparently Valve is launching a new “alternate reality game” (ARG), perhaps having to do with the Portal sequel fans have been awaiting, or maybe even the next episode of Half-Life 2.

This may be the first instance of a gaming company (or at least a non-MMO company) to hint at something new using a patch to a game several years old. Even Halo’s “I Love Bees” campaign was entirely external to the game.

And it’s really only possible to do this in the first place because Valve uses the Steam launcher/updater to push out new patches automatically and instantaneously, rather than relying upon fans to go to a website and download it. Thus, updating content gamers bought years ago is as simple as making a server change now.

Does this sound familiar?

“Patching” Books?

In the e-book world, this instant-update-of-old-content feature has been used for ill in the past—Amazon’s infamous “1984” incident. And I’ve reflected on the possibility of using it for making corrections in the future.

But what if that’s thinking too small?

In the past, I reviewed a special annotated version of A Fire upon the Deep, for Slashdot. In this e-book, you had to buy the annotated version separately, as a complete separate e-book. But what if you could buy just the annotations, and add them to (or subsequently remove them from) the e-book you already have? Or study/lecture notes, or other supplementary material?

What if when a sequel came out, your e-book shop could push a “patch” out that let you know about it? Perhaps putting sample chapters right on your device for you to look at. (Of course, you should be able to choose to opt out of this system, just as you would with any potentially-spammy updating service.)

Wagging the Long Tail

But perhaps a better way to apply this to e-books is to think about how Valve is essentially revitalizing old, “forgotten-about” content with this new patch. It will get people who bought the game playing it again, and might even attract a new crowd to go out and buy the game (which can be had as a digital download from SteamPowered.com for $20, or as part of the “Orange Box” pack for $30). Talk about a good swift kick in the Long Tail! (As I mentioned last year, Valve has long been known for doing this sort of thing.)

What if a publisher or author were to launch an ARG across selected e-books, with clues (perhaps in the form of bold-faced key words, illustrations inserted into the text, hyperlinks, multimedia content, etc.) automatically pushed to anyone who already owned the e-book?

Of course, a few thing would be necessary for that to be truly effective. Most of all, there would have to be a way to push those changed books out to customers right away, with a minimum of effort required on the customer’s part. (And to return them to normal afterward, unless the added content provides added value to the book in its own right as well as in the context of the game.) At the moment, only the Kindle and the Nook seem to have this capacity thanks to their always-on Internet connections.

Also, the e-book format and reader itself would need to be suitable for the inclusion of this content. If the clue was a multimedia file, for example, it probably could not be read in most e-book readers today.

Of course, given that publishers today are having so much trouble just getting e-books right in the first place, this can only be considered so much blue sky at this point. But maybe someday, when e-books have achieved a greater level of maturity, something like this could become commonplace.

A few days ago

Erin Cox at Publishing Perspectives notes with some amusement that, shortly after Nintendo announced a classic e-books cartridge, Random House has now announced it will be making video games. The Wall Street Journal article is fairly sparse on details, but notes that this is an effort to find a new revenue stream due to economic pressure from publishing cutbacks and the likelihood that the increasing popularity of e-books will cause lower revenues.

Also on Publishing Perspectives, Edward Nawotka posts an editorial wondering whether the e-book age means an end to the serendipity of finding a good book through browsing bookstores and junk shops.

A couple of stories from the UK:

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes that UK consumer rights group Consumer Focus has issued a report saying copyright law is “outdated” and so confusing that millions of people are breaking laws without even realizing it. (Meanwhile, in America, an appeals court just struck down an “innocent infringement” defense—that it was possible to fileshare music without realizing it was wrong—in a music filesharing case.)

Unfortunately, the Digital Economy Bill (which I mentioned earlier today) seems to be going in exactly the wrong direction.

Catherine Neilan at TheBookseller.com reports that UK libraries are especially vulnerable to local council budget cuts, with an estimated 25,000 jobs endangered by the recession.

Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio was very positive about the device, calling it Barnes & Noble’s “single best-selling product.” He declined to discuss how many of them Barnes & Noble had sold, however.

Riggio said that the Nook had boosted B&N’s online sales by 67% in January, and would have boosted it even further if they’d had more devices in stock. B&N plans to expand its in-store marketing efforts for the Nook, citing their brick-and-mortar retail presence as one marketing advantage they have over the Kindle.

Another point Riggio made was that Nook e-books could be read on the Nook but also in reader software for a number of platforms, including the Blackberry and iPhone. Still, having a branded device was an important part of B&N’s strategy, but the content catalog, cloud-style access, and customer service are important too.

Barnes and Noble has recently begun raising its e-book prices leaving many of its loyal Nookers exasperated. Their sense of betrayal is a theme becoming more and more common in the e-book world as customers are feeling like victims of the classic “bait and switch” tactic: the bait being the purported savings to be found in e-books and the switch being the DRM-laden, increasingly over-priced books they are getting. Take for instance Denise PW who writes:

Shame on B&N for this outrageous price increase! This is totally unacceptable! You finally got your ereader product in some semblance of working order, & this is how you reward your customers? You jack up the prices so beyond the realm of reason? If this is the result of publisher pressure, then B&N should tell us. Otherwise, I will lay the blame at B&N & their greed. Which reminds me why I really stopped going to B&N & preferred Borders…

Many of these Nook users are raising the same concerns Kindle users have already raised regarding the feasibility of charging more than 9.99 per e-book.

Their objections center around the DRM that Barnes and Noble insists on using as well as their pricing practices which result in e-books that sell for more than even the hardcover. Reading Bum captures the growing sense of frustration that Nook users are feeling as he states:

“Think about it. We don’t even own these books. We’re only licensing them. But yet we’re still being charged more than a paper back and in some cases a hardcover. That’s ridiculous and far from fair. I’d rather them withhold the e-book until the paperback comes out, and then charge us a fair price! I’ll wait”

When the Nook came out some people—this writer included—speculated that Barnes and Noble was planning on using a “copier cartridge” approach to e-books, in which the reader would eventually sell for less than a Kindle but be subsidized by higher e-book prices. This plan was delayed as Barnes and Noble attempted to compete with Kindle e-book prices.

But now that it has built a relatively strong e-reader following for its device, it has chosen to raise its prices. There are many possible explanations but the most salient has to be its attempting to not cannibalize paper book sales. Sadly, Nook users could serve as a control group while Kindlers could serve as the experimental group, for us to finally test whether or not “actively” boycotting is truly more efficient at holding down prices than “passively” boycotting: the latter being nothing more than allowing market forces to dictate price elasticity. There appears to be considerably more resistance to boycotting higher prices in the land of Nook than presently exists with the Kindle. Slaughter S. captures the prevailing consensus:

“I ain’t going to boycott squat. I am going to read what I want to and need to. Price is only part of the equation … probably the smaller one. I would rather pay double for a really great read than screw around with some piece of cheap trash. The publishers know that and, you know what? They charge what the market will bare. Your logic is eminently assailable. For example you would have someone fail to read something that can benefit them because it costs $15.00 instead of $10.00? That’s really and quite literally stupid. By your logic, you should be reading comic books. Cheap knowledge … yeah that’s how to get ahead.”

If I were a Nook user I would feel a strange sense of commonality with a Snook, because you are probably about to be hooked by unfair pricing and DRM.

Editor’s Note: You can find the discussions on this topic at the Barnes & Noble ebook discussion forums here.

USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List now includes sales figures from the Barnes & Noble nook and Sony’s Reader™ Store in overall sales rankings. This is in addition to Kindle sales which were added in July 2009. USA TODAY is the first major book list to include this variety of digital book sales. The list runs in Thursday’s edition of USA TODAY and online at booklist.usatoday.com.

Rankings for USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List are based on retail sales data collected each week that include more than 2.5 million volumes from about 7,000 physical retail outlets in addition to books sold online. USA TODAY’s list ranks titles regardless of genre or format, providing one of the best assessments of which books are most popular among readers and consumers each week. USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list has been published each Thursday in the newspaper’s Life section since October 28, 1993. …