How much do you spend a year on books?
Don’t buy books: 10
$0–$50: 22
$50–$100: 30
$100–$250: 18
$250+: 19

Do you have an e-reader like the Kindle or the Nook?
Yes: 10
No: 90

Would you download pirated copies of books if they were available?
Yes: 27
No: 68

If you prefer LCDs over E Ink but think the iPhone screen is too small, will you now switch from your Kindle hardware to your laptop or tablet? Or maybe even buy a bargain-priced portable computer to go a-Kindlin’? How about the color capabilities? And will the new app lead to piracy?

OK, Amazon, scratch one off the to-do list. Now how about the ePub standard for both the software and Kindle hardware?

Google news roundup is here, including a ZDnet link. News release from Amazon, slightly edited, follows. – D.R.

*     *     *

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced the availability of "Kindle for PC," the free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers (PC). The U.S. Kindle Store currently offers more than 360,000 books, including New Releases and 101 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically $9.99 or less. The Kindle Store is the only place to find some of today’s most popular books in digital format. Kindle books can now be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch and PC. Kindle for PC is now available as a free download to readers in over 100 countries.

Kindle for PC features Amazon’s Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Whether you read Kindle books on a Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the free Kindle applications, you can always have your reading with you and never lose your place. With Kindle for PC, you can read some on your PC, read some on your Kindle, and always pick up right where you left off. Whispersync helped make the Kindle for iPhone application the most popular books app in the Apple App Store.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," said Ian Freed, vice president, Amazon Kindle. "Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to access a huge selection from the Kindle Store and read the most popular books of today even if they don’t yet have a Kindle."

With Kindle for PC, readers can take advantage of the following features:

• Purchase, download and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
• Read the beginning of any book for free before they buy
• Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
• Read books in full color including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books, textbooks and graphic novels
• Choose from more than 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
• View notes and highlights marked on Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, and iPod touch
• Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)
• Turn pages with a finger swipe (available in a future release for Windows 7 users)

Microsoft demonstrated Kindle for PC for the first time ever at the Windows 7 launch event last month in New York City. Kindle for PC takes advantage of capabilities in the new Windows 7, including Windows Touch technology. In addition to Windows 7, Kindle for PC is also compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Kindle for PC is available for free download at www.amazon.com/KindleforPC.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

This was the central point of a debate about the fate of educational institutions’ brick-and-mortar libraries at the 2009 Educause Conference in Denver, as reported by Inside Higher Ed.

Despite the objections of “a minority of very loud faculty members,” (Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University) said, the days of wandering through the stacks are over. “People,” she told the audience, of whom many were librarians, “the world has changed, and so have your students, and so have your faculty!”

Though some centered on the need for a physical presence, others discussed how the physical space could morph to accommodate the changing of the times.  This parallels discussions being held across the country (and in other posts here) on the future of the very concept of the public library.

I realize not that many authors would necessarily want to exclude their content from the B&N site.  But I can think of a few reasons to do so: Concern about security, for one; or a displeasure with the B&N eReader’s display of my books, for another.  For people like that, there should be a way to keep your material out of B&N’s site if they wish.  But does Smashwords make that easy to do?  Can you do it at all?  Should it be considered okay for them to do it without my express permission?  Or should they have to formally ask?

I think Smashwords should have an “opt-in” (or “opt-out”) button prominently displayed on its publishing or dashboard pages, giving authors the clear choice of  having their material forwarded to Barnes & Noble.

According to Smashwords’ legalese, you can do a few things to keep your e-book out of B&N’s catalog.  Some of those things are the exclusion of certain material they are looking for (like copyright info).  Another thing you can do is to not select the ePub format to convert your e-book (apparently B&N will use the ePub file to do their own conversion, as opposed to using the eReader format you may have already converted your e-book into… interesting).  But I had to dig down into the Premium Content pages to find these tips.  And for those of us who happen to like the idea of our books being available in ePub, having to de-select one of the fastest-growing formats to keep it out of the B&N store doesn’t seem very right.

There could be a clear “opt-in” on the publishing page the Smashwords member uses to build their e-book offering, or possibly on the member dashboard.  Right there, along with pricing and selecting of formats, tag-words, etc, should be a button to check that gives permission to have your material forwarded to B&N (assuming it passes muster otherwise).   That would allow users to prepare their Smashwords e-books as they desired, and not worry about how they will appear in the B&N site.

I realize that my very use of Smashwords could be considered a de-facto agreement to allow my material to be uploaded to B&N (though that obviously wasn’t an option when I put them in, but applied after the fact).  But I wonder if that’s good enough, legally.  I wonder if there shouldn’t be a more obvious “opt-in” choice for Smashwords users.  My feeling is yes.  What do you think?

TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Are you reading this commentary — or — are you screening this? Or screading it, even? How you answer the question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this.

Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first volley in this now-national discussion.

“Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?” Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a savvy Globe copyeditor: “I screen, you screen, we all screen.”

The answer to Beam’s question is, of course, yes! From most of the research that has come in so far from academics in North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone’s in agreement with what it all means.

Perhaps some future MRI brain scan studies will show us how different parts of the brain light up when we read on paper compared to when we read on a computer screen or a Kindle? I think scientists will crack this soon.

Yes, “screening” already has multiple meanings, so can we really call screen-reading “screening”? For example, we screen movies, we screen job candidates, we screen patients for medical problems, we do a lot of “screening” in this world of ours.

As for “reading,” we read books, we read maps, we read minds, we read palms, we read the clouds, we read lots of things.

When I asked Dr. Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway what she thought about perhaps using the word screening” for reading on a screen, she told me in an email: “My first impression is that the term ’screening’ is adequate in some respects, but not in others. It’s adequate to the extent that it points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly).”

Dr Mangen, in an important academic paper published in Britain last December of 2008, listed a few reasons that reading on paper and reading on a screen are two very different animals.

* Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper.

* The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.

* Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.

* The visual happenings on a compter screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its set ip can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or newspaper or magazine does not.

* The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogsphere are getting interesting — and heated. But more and more, top experts in the computer and Internet fields, as well as typeface designers and readability gurus, are in agreement that we need a new word for reading on screens, and that the word should be “screening.” For now. A completely new word might come down the information highway in the future and take the place of screening. But for now, you screen, I screen, we all screen.

We asked Kevin Kelly, the well-respected maverick of Wired magazine, what he felt about this new word for reading on screens, he told us by email in one short sentence: “I would be happy to see screening become a verb (for this).”

Mim Harrison, a book editor in Florida with Levenger Press, said: “I find the distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing, and it certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we’re doing with our eyeballs these days.”

“Screening, of course, is not a new term,” a top expert in predicting the future told us in a recent email, but this might just be the time that it catches on in the way you suggest. Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.”

And then he added this important note: “It is the right word for the moment in terms of drawing people’s attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over us.”

When we asked technology reporter John Markoff at the New York Times about this idea, he replied in a one-word email note: “Hmmmmmmm.”

We asked David Pogue at the New York Times the same question, and he said: “Very interesting.”

We asked another top specialist in the field, a former MacArthur genius award winner, what he felt about a new word for reading on screens, and he said: “I rather like ’screading’.”

So, dear Reader, er, Screener, er, Screader, what is your point of view on all this? Do we need a new word for reading on a screen, and what might that word be? Any more suggestions? Dish!

Please reply privately to me at davidrothmanNOSPAMpobox.com. This is for an essay that among other things will explore Brown’s treatment of the Jewish religion (detail: it’s possible the Solomons never were Jewish). Thanks! I’m also checking elsewhere.

Dear Paul,

I proudly present the first book about e-books in The Netherlands. My “E-books Handboek 2010″ is available in print (POD), EPUB and Mobipocket. The book is for sale at Ebook.nl (EPUB and Mobipocket) and Mobipocket.com. In print the book has 266 pages. It has chapters about the e-readers, reading software and of course about the e-books. Besides that the distribution and sales, business models, copyrights, the production of e-books, the e-book and the society (environment and education) and the future of e-books get a lot of attention. Teleread is also featured in the book as a very important source of actual information about e-books.

More information about the book can be found on the site of the publisher, InCT, a magazine about innovative publishing: http://www.inct.nl/index.php?page=publicaties. The e-book editions contain 50% more pictures at a much lower price. Unfortunately it is only available in Dutch. The copyrights of the book are for sale. Anyone interested?

As a publisher of travel guidebooks in The Netherlands I have supported the development of e-books ever since I bought a Rocket eBook reader in 1998.
I hope you can give my book some attention on your site.
Thanks a lot in advance!

Michiel Hatenboer

Stay tuned.

Evidently this is not correct. Plastic Logic has issued a statement saying:

“The video report is inaccurate and the individual (who was apparently filmed while attending a trade show was not an authorized Barnes & Noble spokesperson) was misinformed.

We are excited to have Barnes & Noble powering the Plastic Logic e-commerce store. While colour is on Plastic Logic’s roadmap, it is not on the map for the Spring of 2010. Plastic Logic has said for quite some time it is working on colour, but not for a product in the coming year.”

More details here.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

… The manuscript has been posted in CommentPress, a WordPress-based plugin that allows comments to be attached to whole pages or to individual paragraphs. The book also has a community blog, on which any registered user can post more extended commentary, or larger questions about the project that aren’t easily tied to a specific location.

All of this discussion will be extremely useful to me as I begin the process of revision, but it’s also helping to demonstrate what I firmly believe will be the future of peer review in networked environments — “peer-to-peer review,” as I’m fond of calling it. …

Thanks to Joe Gallagher for the link.

The article commences:

The long saga of Professor Carol Shloss’s dispute with the Estate of James Joyce over her right to use copyrighted source materials in connection with her biography of Lucia Joyce has come to a remarkable end: Last May, the Court ordered the Estate to pay more than $326,000 in attorneys’ fees. After initially appealing that decision to the Ninth Circuit, the Estate thought better of it and agreed to pay $240,000 in fees to resolve the matter once and for all.

This lawsuit represented the culmination of more than ten years of threats and intimidation by Stephen James Joyce, who purported to prohibit Professor Shloss from quoting from anything that James or Lucia Joyce ever wrote for any purpose. As a result of these threats, significant portions of source material were deleted from Shloss’s book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake. Roughly a year into the lawsuit, the Estate agreed to settle the case on terms that permit the publication of the material that was deleted. But Shloss also demanded the Estate pay attorneys’ fees to compensate her counsel for the many hours they put in vindicating her rights in the face of the Estate’s assertions of infringement. With this payment, much of that cost has been recouped.

The key here is to realize there are solutions to problems like the one Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation. The risks and costs of standing up for important rights like hers may be significant, but they can be managed. The playing field can be leveled and the tables can be turned. I hope this fact is impressed not only on other scholars, but also on the institutions that need to support them when they are faced with threats like these, as well as lawyers who are in a position to donate their time to help.

I hope what we accomplished here becomes a model for dealing with problems like the one Carol faced, whether my organization is involved or not. Whether that happens or not, I’m proud of Carol for standing her ground, proud of what we accomplished with her, and proud to have worked with the fantastic team of lawyers that got us here.

Q You did battle with Microsoft in the 1990s. Is Google the new Microsoft?

A In some ways no, but in some ways, unfortunately, yes. I have to say the amount of power that Google has acquired, while nobody was paying attention, is downright scary. And the defenses and excuses they use are very reminiscent of Microsoft in the ’90s. I mean, they say they are really not dominant. Well, of course, they are dominant. …

Thanks to Resource Shelf for the link.