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.

Even if the single-purpose devices are better at their purpose than the multi-purpose device, Rapoza suggests, the multi-purpose one will still win out because it is simply more convenient. I am inclined to agree: my iPod Touch may not have as big a screen as the e-ink readers I have tested, but I do not have any problem reading on it—and it fits better in my pocket.

i-Mobilize

The company claims to have “contracted with several publishers to bring their catalogs to the iPhone and expects to have hundreds on sale in the coming months.” It also claims "Our new eBook reader technology puts us on a level playing field with the major players like Stanza and Amazon,” but I have my doubts.

They certainly could have chosen a more unique name. At the moment, there are four apps on the app store with “iRead” in their names—none of them from i-Mobilize.

Since the press release mentions individual books being under review by Apple, I suspect that that “iRead” is going to be yet another encapsulated e-book format in which the e-books are sold as individual apps.

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.

At least that’s Eric Jhonsa’s belief, and he’s right. Many people will favor the Kindle’s larger screen, for example. As I’ve written before, e-books are like eyeglasses or hearing aids. Individual tastes and needs can vary.

But I’m not so sure about certain of Jhonsa’s other details. Granted, there isn’t a single modern bestseller among the top 20 paid apps for the iPhone, just as he notes. But the Kindle software on the iPhone can pick up the same bestsellers that the hardware Kindle can, and they don’t need to be separate apps. So why did he home on the app list?

Furthermore, as Jhonsa concedes in responding to readers’ comments, it isn’t as if everyone hates LCDs for extended reading. I don’t—I find the text to be more readable on my iPod Touch than on my not-so-contrasty Kindle. Nicholas Baker (right photo) is also a fan of LCDs for book reading. One way to reduce or eliminate eye irritation is simply to keep the brightness down

I’d also note that many more people are reading e-books on laptops and PCs than on dedicated e-readers. Yes, that could change somewhat as prices of dedicated readers decline. But then netbooks—small laptops—will benefit from Pixel Qi tech, which can combine the best characteristics of LCDs and E Ink.

That said, I certainly support Jhonsa’s main premise. The Kindle isn’t going away—it has too many fans who like it for reading.

Detail for latecomers: The word “Foolish,” in the world of the Motley Fool, actually means “wise.”

Nintendo, in its last earnings call, stated that competition from the iPhone was one of the reasons its profits fell by half in the last quarter and Flurry feels that this is some indication of what the iPhone could do to Amazon. Amazon, however, has its own iPhone app and I don’t know, and Flurry doesn’t mention, how this could play into the equation. It could very well be that having the ability to read the same book on both the iPhone and the Kindle could increase, rather than decrease, Amazon’s share. Also, the 1% figure is probably a bit low, since Amazon only has 1 app, but many people are probably using it, like me, to read their Kindle books.

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.

I don’t intend to do this often—but given that there are a lot of people who read e-books using iPhone and iPod Touch applications, it occurred to me someone might be able to point me at a useful answer. (Description after the jump so as not to bother those to whom it is irrelevant.)

I recently had to restore my 1st-gen Touch to factory settings because it was no longer syncing properly. (I had previously tried reverting to the last backup, but that did not fix it so this was the last resort.) When this happened, I lost all data on the versions of the apps that synced to my iPod.

However, I believe the information remained intact in the backup directory (which I have since copied to a separate folder just in case). I would like to transfer the backed-up versions of some of these apps back to the current version of my iPod.

The problem is, the free version of the one app I can find that pulls files out of the backup, Reincubate’s “Backup Extractor,” will only extract one file at a time. Not one app—one file. Given that apps are made up of dozens or even hundreds of files, this is simply not a solution—and my finances will not permit me to pay $25 to register it.

So I was hoping someone could tell me either where to find a similar app for free that will restore entire apps with their settings (such as the Checkbook app with my check register in it, or the Distant Shore app that held dozens of anonymous bottle messages whose senders I cannot reach any other way), or tell me how to do it manually by copying app directories from one place to another.

Please leave a comment here, or on the Mahalo Answers link at the beginning of the article.

Thanks!

According to the Apple App Store the first issues of Ironman, Astonishing X Men, Amazing Spider-Man and Age of Apocalypse are available. They cost $0.99 each.

The app has bookmarking capabilities, and a page indexing feature and the comics do not have to be reformatted to show on the screen. The purchased books can be organized by title, publisher, author, artist and genre.

Thanks to TechCrunch for the link.

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.

I would go for the Kindle 2. I’ve used a number of the Sony units, a Kindle 1 and 2, have seen the Nook close up and played with the Astak 5" before I sent it over to Chris Meadows for review. Plus, I handled a number of other units at BookExpo America earlier this year. Here are my reasons for choosing the Kindle:

1. Wireless: once you become accustomed to the free wireless on the Kindle you may very well find it becomes indispensable. It is just so convenient. For example, when I went into the Nook press conference I was sitting on the ferry going across the Hudson and saw someone reading a book I was interested in. I fired up my Kindle and downloaded the book before I reached the other side. Once you can do this you will be amazed at how many books you end up buying. Of course the Nook has wireless too, but for reasons mentioned below I prefer the Kindle implementation.

2. Browser: the Kindle has a built in browser. It’s not very good, but it is important because it enables the Kindle to be a far more open platform than its wireless Nook rival. With the browser you can download from the vast catalog of Gutenberg and also get books from MobileRead, Manybooks, and Feedbooks, among others. At the beach and want to read Dickens? You can on the Kindle. I have even used the Kindle to send email when I’ve been stuck in areas with no AT&T service. The Nook will only connect to the B&N store and this is too limiting for me. I wish Sony had released its wireless unit in time for this little article but no luck so far.

3. iPhone: Having the same reader on the Kindle and the iPhone is an incredible convenience. I really prefer reading on an e-ink screen, but I regularly read on the iPhone in places where it would be inconvenient to carry the Kindle. I have 8 pages of books on the Kindle and I have them all on the iPhone and they, like the phone, are with me 100% of the time. That’s a screen shot of some of the books on my iPhone, above.

4. Price: I have generally found, although I have not made a real study of it, that Kindle book prices are usually cheaper than those from Barnes & Noble.

5. Wireless subscriptions: I really love having my latest issue of The Economist delivered every Friday. I also get Analog delivered monthly.

So that’s my choice. There are no bad readers out there, at least as far as I have seen, so I don’t think you’ll go wrong no matter which one you choose

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.