Other regional papers, such as The Baltimore Sun, The Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, The Providence Journal, The Washington Times, The New York Observer, The Salt Lake Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, Barron's, The Christian Science Monitor, The Columbus Dispatch, Reason and the New York Review of Books will also be added shortly.

Even better—the Reader Daily Edition is now shipping to those who pre-ordered the ereader, though if you didn't lodge your interest with Sony previously, you'll have to wait until the 15th of January before you can get your hands on one. Pre-ordered and already received your ereader? Let us know how you're getting on with it. [PC Mag]

The update will address many of the quirks users have experienced thus far with the new e-reader. Topping the alleged list are performance improvements and a faster page refresh rate, both of which Wilson identified in his mostly positive Nook review earlier this month.

Update: Our own tipster wrote to say that this is 100% confirmed, citing an announcement that was made on B&N's internal employee network. We may have some visual proof shortly. [Engadget]

A daily news summary will be on offer for WSJ readers, in addition to the digital version of the paper. The digital copy of the paper will sell punters back $14.99 a month, with the daily summary another $5, and the New York Post will cost $9.99 a month, exclusively sold on the Reader Daily Edition.

On sale sometime before 2010 (that's 13 days, then), it'll cost $399.99. [WSJ]

While Borders already sells electronic books (in ePub format), they've bought a fair chunk of eBook retailer Kobo. What's this mean? Well Kobo distributes, not just to eBook readers, but to the iPhone, Blackberries, Palm phones and Android handsets.

And though Borders has not yet announced plans to distribute books through smartphones, their money speaks differently.

Also something odd to ponder: most of Kobo's 2 million titles are free. [Kobo via The Register]

The Kobo service is already live and will apparently allow downloading of "content to the most popular smartphones, including the Apple iPhone, Research in Motion BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Google Android devices."

Everything sounds quite lovely, right down to the point of Borders and Kobo wanting to make everything an open platform, but I'm just curious to see what sort of device the partnership will produce and when we'll actually see it on the market. [NY Times]

There's a battle raging (okay, it's actually being handled rather quietly through proper legal channels) right now between publishers and authors over who owns the digital publishing rights of older books. In one corner, you have the authors claiming that because ebook rights were not set explicitly, they retain the right to publish. In the other corner, you have the publishers claiming that ebooks fall under the category of "books" and as such they own the rights.

You can see how this gets messy. In 2002 a Manhattan judge ruled in favor of the authors. saying that ebooks are separate from books. But that's just one case, and there's sure to be more legal action to follow.

You can read more at the link. It's yet another interesting conflict over who owns what, brought about by the gadgets we create. [NY Times]

Books, in the paper and ink form, have been around for over a thousand years. You can bet your prized copy of Cloud Computing For Dummies that when the first book, the Diamond Sutra, was finished, those still chipping their chisels into stone, or carving papyrus downed their tools and said something along the lines of "thank the lord, reading's become even easier now!" It was a much-needed change, unlike the electronic books manufacturers like Sony and Amazon have been trying to flog.

A few ereaders existed before Sony swaggered onto the playing field, but it wasn't until 2004's DRM-riddled Librie (upon hearing of the Librie, Boing Boing's ever-militant Mark Frauenfelder exclaimed "This self-destruct feature is sickening. Who would buy a Librie with this deadly defect built in?") that they came into prominence, much like a curried egg sandwich on a humid day. In a rainforest. In Indonesia. With a placard saying ‘SMELL ME' and a marketing budget backing it up the size of, well, Sony's.

A handful of people since then have invested the amount they could've spent on a couple of phones on one of these devices, but that's not the last time they've had to dig deep in their pockets, ignoring the loose change they'd normally spend on a paperback, searching instead for their credit card or Amazon gift vouchers.

With ebooks costing between $10 - $15, you're forced into continually feeding your Kindle/Reader/Nook/Other-warm-and-nurturing-sounding-device with cash, and as the ereaders are so physically large you also need to invest in a manbag just to avoid being mugged. Did we say mugged? We meant "laughed at." There's a reason why you don't see people using them on public transport.

They're impractical and expensive. It's such a Sony trait, to reinvent the wheel when the current model is still going ‘round perfectly. While Blu-ray may've eclipsed the deceased HD DVD (RIP), barely anyone uses an SACD player anymore (disclosure: except, err, me. But only with one album – Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms. Cough.) Even less people than that still use Betamax and MiniDisc. They, like the ereader, are futile exercises in trying to create a market for something that has little demand.

That's the crux of my argument. Any company that attempts to own market share in that area is fighting a losing battle. Consumers won't buy an electronic book when they can get a paperback for the same price or even less, and when they can lend it to friends, read it in the bathtub or even sell it on and make a percentage of their money back.

Our grandchildren won't be housing first edition ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kindle, passed down from generation to generation. There's no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book, and when it comes to works of fiction and non, which have had thousands of man-hours injected into them, surely that's the reason people read them? To escape for a few hours turning some pages, and then eventually handing it to a friend with a glowing recommendation to read it from cover to cover?

Instead, we're now encouraged to send links to one another or rely on Amazon to recommend titles, and to poke a button to turn the pages. I imagine the writer of Diamond Sutra never would've put up with e-ink page lag, nor been too impressed with having to charge the device after only a few days' worth of pressing a button repeatedly, trying to turn the bloody page.

I have no beef with reading ebooks on a mobile phone or tablet, however.

During September of this year, there were more ebooks added to Apple's App Store than there were games, according to San Francisco-based analysts Flurry. There's an obvious advantage to reading an ebook on an iPhone, as chances are you already own one. You don't have to fork out several hundred dollars on a new device that just displays lines of e-ink. iPhones are devices which serve more than one purpose, and while some ereaders allow for music playback and even gaming, you'd never buy one just to play MP3s on.

Same story with tablets—whether you've got an Archos, ASUS or a secret Apple tablet no-one knows about. Provided the cost of the ebooks doesn't outweigh the cost of a paperback, it's an extra bonus for anyone who owns one of these multi-purpose devices.

Not even the comments of Nintendo President Satoru Iwata bothered me, when he told the Financial Times that they're considering equipping the next version of the DSi with 3G connectivity to download ebooks on. At its heart, any Nintendo product will always be bought for gaming, and if it offers other features such as ebooks, then that's a nice extra. But it won't be bought for the ability to read books on.

While analysts Forrester Research claim that 3 million e-readers will be sold in the US during 2009, it seems even Amazon and Barnes & Noble aren't too confident of the lasting power of their devices. Both companies have launched apps for the iPhone, which give close to 40m users access to hundreds of thousands of books on devices they already owned. Is this a case of Amazon and Barnes & Noble shooting themselves in the foot, or safeguarding themselves over what they know will be a short-lived industry? My money's on the latter, but tell me your thoughts.

Simon & Schuster sees what's happening: Real people are buying ebooks now, and the market, in its infancy, is forming habits and expectations. Like bestsellers for just 10 bucks—bestsellers that sell for 30 dollars in their hardcover form. Or should, anyway, but the devaluation of verbiage has been trickling over to real books too, since nobody fucks with Walmart, and they've been aggressively price matching, resulting in all out price war.

It's the worst of all possible scenarios: Publishers aren't just making less money on ebooks, but on the paper ones too. And people will get the crazy idea in their head that that's what books are worth, the same way we all think a song is worth 99 cents. (Or, um, nothing to the unscrupulous.)

So Simon and Schuster's plan is to plug ebooks into their own special place in the publishing cycle: Four months after hardcovers. Meaning you'll have to wait 1/3 of a year after a book's published to read it on a Kindle or Nook or tablet or whatever. It establishes a value hierarchy, that looks, as the WSJ points out a lot like the theatrical release cycle for movies. It's true, the movie industry has fared better than the music industry in preserving the perception of value of their content. But if you look, digital movies have slowly crept up to be same-day as DVD. They're just really damn expensive—15 bucks.

It's hard for the publishing industry to do the same thing—charge a premium for the digital version—since they're trying to get this whole ebook thing off the ground, not to mention the experience just isn't as good as a real book, at least not yet. They're still trying to hook people. It's not an easy place to be, at least not until the ebook experience stacks up more definitively with the real book one. Making people wait 4 months to buy books on their Kindle will, at best, simply hurt ebooks, because no one wants to wait for new stuff, least of all, words. At worst, it'll put people off of buying those books entirely—they'll wait for them to hit nook at $10, but'll have lost interest by the time it comes out. And then the publisher's still screwed. More to the point, like the music industry found out, and as the movie and TV business is struggling with, the new model is going to break the old one, and arbitrary limitations, will fall like the dead trees they print things on.

I do not envy you, Mr. Publisher Man. [WSJ]

Speaking at an event yesterday about France's plans to place the nation's books online, he said:

"We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is"

It's not the first time Google's been attacked over its Books scheme, with the controversy coming to a head in October when Sergey Brin was forced to defend Google in a column in the New York Times.

Writing for the New York Times, Brin said:

"This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers"

With controversy surrounding the Google Books plan for over a year now, I have a feeling this isn't the last of it, especially now that the hot-headed French President has weighed in. [Reuters]

Image credit: Downing Street

The reader has 24 hours of continuous use (not too shabby for an LCD, even if it is monochrome), and supports MP3 and photos. It's 5 inches big, reads ePub and PDF as well as TXT, Mobi, PRC and RTF formats. Those of you who like downloading books from "non-official" sources know that they usually come in one of those formats. But the Libre comes with 100 "free" books, which are most likely public domain books you could get for free.

We'll see how it stacks up to e-ink type readers when we test it, but on paper, this seems like a pretty decent (cheap) alternative. Especially because it promises a faster page-turn refresh rate than e-ink. It comes in black and white. [Aluratek]

Aluratek, Inc., a leading creator of sophisticated yet user-friendly computer peripherals and consumer electronic devices, announces Libre – the new eBook Reader with exclusive LCD technology. Libre provides the most affordable product in the category, featuring superior battery life with up to 24 hours of continuous use, auto-off and page advance features, MP3 and photo support.

Utilizing the latest monochrome reflective light LCD display technology, the Libre eBook Reader PRO provides a crisp black and white 5-inch screen with the same appearance and readability of printed paper. There is no backlighting, so reading on the Libre is as soft on the eyes as reading a book, while also preserving battery power.

The Libre supports Adobe's Digital Edition software allowing Digital Rights Management (DRM) support for ePUB and PDF formats. This allows users to purchase new book releases from a variety of eBook content providers including eBooks.com, one of Aluratek's content partners.

With an MSRP of $179, the Libre is a cost-effective solution for anyone looking to experience the next generation of digital technology related to books. The Libre connects to any Mac or PC with an Internet connection for easy access to the newest book releases as well as timeless classics. It also comes loaded with 100 free eBooks on the included 2GB SD card.

"Unlike e-Ink displays which require multiple flashes for each page advance, I believe the reflective LCD technology the Libre offers will be a welcome change compared to other eBooks currently on the market" said John Wolikow, VP Sales and Marketing for Aluratek. "The ability to store thousands of your favorite books in the Libre is not only convenient but it's also good for the environment by saving trees."

Libre comes with a 2GB SD card, and supports SD and SDHC cards up to 32GB. The audio player feature lets users also listen to their favorite MP3s, and the picture viewer supports BMP, JPG, GIF and animated GIF. Versatile for any user, Libre offers five font size options and also supports Adobe DRM, ePUB, PDF, FB2, TXT, Mobi, PRC and RTF formats.

Other key features of the Libre include: table of contents, bookmark list and page, content search, jump to page, zoom, auto page turn, background music, multiple language formats, auto power off and a help menu.

The Libre eBook Reader PRO is available in either black or white with an MSRP of $179. For more information about the Libre eBook Reader PRO, or any of Aluratek's other innovative products, please visit www.aluratek.com.

The big change happens this Friday, with all books downloadable in the open EPUB format only. The other news is that the Reader Library 3.1 software will also become available on Friday, bringing both Mac and PC support—head's up, Snow Leopard and Windows 7 users. [Sony]

Let's start with Sherman Alexie, author of a fair number of popular (and quite good!) books, including Reservation Blues and Flight. He's known for his sense of humor, but he's dead serious about ebooks—specifically, about how they will destroy literature, forever, or something: His points are as follows:

1. Ebook readers are a threat to privacy
2. Jeff Bezos makes cryptic comments about "changing how people read," which is sinister, even though it's fairly obvious that he's speaking literally
3. The music industry was crippled by piracy; therefore the book industry will be crippled by piracy
4. Once books are digitized by publishers, they will be stolen (this part is true)
5. The "open source" culture destroys the concept of ownership

The way he throws around the term "open source" seemingly without knowing what it means, the way he cites unease with how much personal information is stored on the Kindle (does he have nightmares about cellphones, too?), and his apparent lack of understanding about the mechanics of piracy makes me think he's just a bit misinformed about the details of his case, which he obviously feels very strongly about. If he had his facts straight, I'm not sure his case would change, and I think he'd still be able to make good points—this is zeal, not malice.

Which brings me to Alan Kaufman, poet, novelist, and maker of unfortunate analogies:

When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term "hi-tech" I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people.

That's right, people. Ebook readers are like war criminals. It's uncanny!

Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.

The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay.

Crematoria lit? Seriously? What's especially vexing here is that buried underneath all the Godwin's Law-ing, there's a real point: It's scary that Amazon can reach into your pocket and delete a book that you've purchased, and, though to a much lesser degree, that they know what you're reading. (I mean, so does the dude behind the counter at your totally not-genocidal local book store, right? Your library?) Plus, Kaufman fails to make a distinction between a regime that would have like to have control over all books so it could censor them, and companies that happen to be gaining more control over books because they want to make money.

And seriously, do I really have to point this out? Nazis didn't burn books because they though paper was wasteful and dumb—they burned books to destroy ideas.

Tune in next week, when I'll be explaining why Steve Jobs is nothing like Pol Pot, and how it would be in poor taste to invoke the Rwandan Genocide to explain why MiniDisc didn't succeed. It's possible to talk about consumer electronics without exploiting our century's greatest human tragedies. Try it! [HuffPo via TechDirt]

Sesame Workshop, the drab corporate body behind the warm, suneshiney smile that is Sesame Street, has always been a little late to the digital party. This time they're nipping at the heels of Disney, which opened up its own Digital Books site in September. Well, better late than never.

Sesame Street books available digitally? Terrific. What's not so hot is how they're handling it, along with their publishing partner Impelsys. They'll start tomorrow by offering five free e-books at sesamestreet.org/ebooks, but those titles can only be read on your monitor, not downloaded. They'll introduce more titles sometime next spring, but will still leave about 98% of their back catalog to be rolled out at an indeterminate pace for an indeterminate subscription price (Disney charges around $80 a year). So let's see: a long wait for a few books that I can't download? Might have to pass on this one.

That's not even to mention the biggest inherent problem, which is that most e-readers currently available on the market aren't built for kids, and can't handle color. At least not yet they can't. And until they can, e-books for toddlers make about as much sense as Snuffleuphagus's taxonomy report. [Impelsys via WSJ]

A Two-Horse Race

Do this now: Disregard all other ebook readers on the market besides Nook and Kindle. Unless you plan to get all of your books from back-alley torrents, or stick to self-published and out-of-copyright PDFs, you are going to need a reader with a good content-delivery system, one it connects to directly via wide-area network. And as long as you're set on e-ink as your preferred means of digital reading—and it's still the choice that's easiest on the eyes and the battery—you're going to need a reader that isn't crapped up with gimmicks that supposedly compensate for the slow display.

But more on the Nook. The thing that makes it special is its two screens: one e-ink for reading books, one touch LCD for navigating and buying books on. More on that later, but basically, the setup works better than the single screen setups on the competition. Sony messed up by putting a glare-inducing film over its screen to provide questionably beneficial touch controls; iRex avoided that, but made a "touch" interface that requires a stylus. Kindle plays it straight, developing a user interface that works well enough with physical buttons and e-ink (as long as you don't use the "experimental" browser). Nook preserves the same pleasurable reading experience, but tucks in the capacitive-touch LCD screen for added control. In its 1.0 implementation, Nook is not as fast or as smooth as it should be, but already it's showing that the second screen is not a gimmick.

Still, I need to get this out of the way: The second screen is not a sudden and miraculous cure for what ails ebook readers. It may prove to be, but B&N's current implementation is conservative. As yet, there are too few occasions on the Nook when I notice an LCD feature and say "Kindle can't do that." In fact, the Kindle development team hasn't been sitting on their asses—the latest firmware makes Kindle more sprightly than ever, with subtle but awesome user-interface improvements. But Barnes & Noble is itself promising round-the-clock enhancing, optimizing and debugging over the next few months, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were three or four updates pushed through the Nook by March—the first possibly before Christmas.

Is it Good Enough Now
Does that mean it's not ready now? Let me put it this way: If you are lucky enough to have pre-ordered one in the first wave for the Dec. 7 shipping, or patient enough to wait until mid-January for the next wave, you are going to get a gadget worth being excited about.

And when Barnes & Noble gets its in-store offers and book-lending operation underway, Amazon will have to step up, or sit down.

Big Screen, Little Screen

The first thing I noticed about the LCD was that it was too bright. E-ink is all about eyeball comfort, and I hadn't really thought about how the LCD underneath would compromise that. Because you don't want your eyes to have to adjust every time you look down and back up again, it turns out you want that thing a lot dimmer than you might if it was a standalone device. The automatic brightness adjuster isn't really up to the job, but I found that by dialing it all the way down when reading in bed, and bumping it up a tad, like to 20%, when reading in sunlight, my eyes could look up and down without any annoyance.

The second thing I noticed about the LCD was how nice its keyboard was. Unlike the Kindle, the Nook's keyboard is only visible when you need it, and as an iPhone user, I found it natural and accurate. The capacitive touch is a real boon, especially on a screen so small.

Besides the keyboard and assorted lists of settings and files, the little screen can display a directional pad for moving around text when highlighting or looking up words in the dictionary; it can give you a search box and a place to type notations; it can pop up the music player without leaving the page; it flows book covers in your library and in the store. And when the screen goes dark, you can make horizontal swipe gestures to turn the pages of the e-ink screen above.

Between the LCD and the e-ink screens is a little upside-down U, actually an "N" from the Nook's logo. This is covered with a capacitive-touch layer too, and serves as the "home" button, which wakes up the LCD with a tap, and takes you to the home screen with a double-tap. (There are physical buttons, too: Two page-turn buttons on each side, and a power button on the top, which work as billed and have no hidden features.)

I found the capacitive interface to be handy, but it also revealed the bugginess of the early software. Scrolling could be sticky, tapping the home button or the screen occasionally did nothing, and using the directional pad to navigate text made me yearn for the Kindle's physical mini-joystick. The biggest disappointment was the page-turning swipe gesture. It failed to work half the time I tried it, and when it did work, I noticed that it responded slower than pressing the physical page-turn buttons.

I raised all of these issues with Barnes & Noble, and fortunately they are on top of this. Fixing bugs and speeding up the UI are the primary goals for the first software revision, and I have no doubt that they will achieve their goals in due time, probably before most people can even buy their Nooks.

While You Read

The Nook won't beat the Kindle if all that LCD is for is facilitating navigation—the interface isn't a bad one, but in its current implementation, it's just an alternative, not an upgrade. The way B&N will beat Amazon is by making that damn screen do crazy stuff. It should start by targeting people who read while doing 12 other things.

Me, I require concentration to get through a page, and even music is a distraction. But for some people, it's not hard to read a book while jamming to tunes, periodically glancing at news tickers, and responding to email or text messages. This is the promise of Nook's second screen.

It already does this to some extent. The music player isn't much yet—and has a few kinks B&N is still working out, like automatically and unpleasantly alphabetizing all your songs—but it's a real applet, unlike the Kindle's. On the Kindle, you type Alt-Space to get a song to play, and you click F to advance to the next song. That's about it. With the Nook, you can load up songs and then scroll through them all, picking one you want to hear, or shuffling the tracks. There's no physical volume button, but you can pull up a slider to adjust it, and another slider to jump around a song. And you can do all of this without leaving the page of your book.

But when you look up a word in the dictionary, the definition pops up on the e-ink screen, not the LCD. When you get an error message, again, the pop-up is on the e-ink. Barnes & Noble designated the e-ink as the place where all "reading" would be done, and that includes messages and sidebar content. I disagree with this, if only because the second screen seems tailor-made for alerts and other pop-up info.

The second screen is also a place for third-party developers to create fun and unexpected applets. Barnes & Noble loves to remind reviewers and customers alike that this baby is powered by Android: In other words, Nook may not look like a Motorola Droid, but developers could write apps for it just as easily.

Right now, the integrated Wi-Fi doesn't feel like much of a bonus. (Though it offers certain benefits when abroad, it only works with Wi-Fi networks that don't require a pop-up webpage. Free or not, those are few and far between.) But Wi-Fi means that developers could write internet apps without fearing a crackdown by AT&T, which provides the no-fee wireless connectivity. Paging Pandora!

Built on Bricks and Mortar

When it comes to shopping for books (and reading them), the Nook is the Kindle's equal, and may soon leverage Barnes & Noble's 800 physical locations to knock it out of first place. I was not able to test these features, because they are only starting to roll out this week, but when you take a Nook to a B&N, it will automatically jump on the store's Wi-Fi network, and offer you free goodies—not just downloads but cookies from the café and other treats. Soon, there will be a way to skim an entire ebook while you're in the store, too. You might say, "Big deal, if I'm in the store, I'll just look at the real book." But that's just the point: How nice will it be to compare real and ebook editions before you buy? I asked B&N about bundles of real book and digital download, and they said discussions with publishers are underway.

Needless to say, one of the biggest advantages the Nook has over the Kindle is the chance for people to touch it before buying it. B&N will start showing off Nooks this week, and will add a few more ebook readers to its lineup, too. People who were afraid of taking the plunge will see the benefits and buy.

(My pet theory as to why Sony and others have sold any ebook readers at all in the US is that they appear in retail locations, unlike Kindle. Because if anything but the Nook was showcased side-by-side with the Kindle in a showroom, the decision to go with Amazon would be easy.)

Barnes & Noble has adopted a more natural attitude toward the books they sell, too, allowing you to access what you buy via ebook readers on Macs and PCs, iPhones and BlackBerrys (and in a few months, Android phones) as well as the Nook. Amazon has an iPhone app but as yet there's no way to read your Kindle book purchases on your own computer, and is now (finally) rolling out PC and Mac Kindle clients, as well as a BlackBerry app.

Speaking of Kindle downloads, some noise has been made about Kindle books being cheaper than B&N ebooks, but Barnes & Noble says that they are in the process of correcting their prices, basically evening them all out so that they're no higher than Amazon's. In my own experience, I found David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for $10 and George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones for just $7. I was pretty pleased, though I was a tad annoyed that sales tax wasn't included in the base price. Be warned there.

Lending is another non-Kindle function rolling out this week that I'll be following up on. You select a book from your collection, lend it to someone listed in your Nook contacts, and they receive a message via email and on their Nook's "Daily" screen, where periodicals, offers and other notices show up. When they accept, they can read the book for two weeks. During that time, you can't read it, and when it reverts back to you, they get a notice to buy. You can't lend the same book to the same person twice.

You can also lend books to someone who doesn't have a Nook, to read on their computer or iPhone or BlackBerry, though the notification only comes from email. (Expect a radically redesigned iPhone client in January with lending and other features.) The new readers from iRex and Plastic Logic will include the Barnes & Noble store, and all your purchases will be accessible on those devices. However, at this point, those two devices won't have the lending capability.

Work in Progress

If I haven't said much about reading books on the Nook itself, it's because it feels very much like a Kindle, right down to the page-turn buttons. The screen is the same—there's no discernible difference whatsoever.

Aesthetically, the Nook is better looking, less busy, with a more proportionate bezel (and a wee bit more girth). I like the gray rubber backing as much as I loved in on the original Kindle—I still don't know why Amazon abandoned that.

The only hardware bummer was the sound of the integrated speakers—Kindle beats Nook here (soundly?), but since both have a 3.5mm jack for headphones, it's mostly a moot point.

The hardware is fully baked, but as I have mentioned the software isn't. Aside from the stickiness of the interface and the flaws in the music player, I found a definite bug in the highlights-and-notes system. I have already listed a what feels like a hundred tiny gripes, but I still have more, like why isn't there AAC playback? And why do I have to get to the home screen to see the clock? (Kindle now shows the time with a single tap of the Menu button, no matter where you are.) I do know why there's no Audible DRM support—because even the devices that supposedly support Audible files don't support the ones most people buy from iTunes, so it's a confusing mess for customers. But I'd still expect the nation's biggest bookstore chain to get serious about audiobooks.

The great thing is that the fixes will come fast and steady, and like the iPhone, this thing will grow. For those of you who took the plunge already, I don't need to tell you to be careful with 1.0 software, because as early adopters you are prepared. And for those of you who missed out on the first batch, guess what? That just means you can wait for the key bugglies to get fixed before you pony up $259. And for those who went for the Kindle this season instead? Congratulations, you have a very nice ebook reader too—for exactly the same price.

In fact, if you have to pick one right now, stick with the Kindle. It's a tough call, because I see a lot of potential in Nook that might not be in Kindle, but damn if the Kindle hasn't grown to comfortably inhabit its e-ink skin. As long as you don't expect apps and extras on a Kindle, it delivers the best ebook experience there is at this moment. And it just went international. But while the limitations of a Kindle are clear, the limitations of the Nook are hazier, presumably further out.

For now, no one will laugh at you for owning either, though you will now surely be ridiculed for spending $400 on a Sony with glare issues, or—pardon me, iRex—anything that requires a stylus. And since many third-party readers are going with the Barnes & Noble store, you'd be dumb to buy any of them instead of the Nook. That may change in the future (can you believe I made it this far without mentioning Apple Tablet?) but for now, in the ebook department, there's just these two big dogs surrounded by a bunch of poodles.

In Brief

Great all-around ebook reader

Second screen serves useful purpose

Expansion and evolution possibilities of this very device are great, especially with touchscreen and Android OS

Lending and in-store Barnes & Noble action will be huge

A little thicker than Kindle, but as a tradeoff, it's a little smaller footprint

Wi-Fi doesn't seem to matter now—hopefully it will prove to be an advantage later

LCD and other features mean less battery life than Kindle, but still adequate, "measured in days"

Many of the Kindle killer functions, like lending and in-store perks, weren't tested, as they are rolling out this week

Current software is buggy and sluggish in spots; hopefully fixes and optimization will come soon

Second-screen possibilities are great, but current implementation is cautious and conservative

Update 1: Unboxing Pics, that I wanted to include because the packaging is just so classy:

Update 2: A word on PDF viewing, which was brought up in comments. Although PDFs are supported natively and use Adobe's mobile PDF system, I can't say I was terribly impressed. Page layout is easily mussed up, and instead of zooming, your only option is to change the font size, in so doing, re-flowing the text and adjusting the picture size. In some ways this is better than on the Kindle, which appears to only offer a screen rotation option. (Tap the font size button and you'll see what I mean.) In all truth, PDFs containing anything but text look pretty grim on either device, but for text-only ones, Nook seems to be a wiser pick.

Update 3: Re: discussions of who has the better catalog, B&N's is being overhauled this week, so expect to see a lot of new pricing and perhaps some newly available titles. We'll do some spot checking later on, but in the meantime, don't be surprised if you see a lot of sudden changes to the lineup.

Update 4: Some of you have asked me about the ePub format, which the Nook does natively support. Third-party non-DRM ePubs can be downloaded from the internet, and side-loaded into the documents folder inside the Nook. When you look at your Documents screen, you'll see them listed with the appropriate metadata. When on screen, they are as adjustable as B&N-purchased ebooks, and generally look just as nice.

"The current thing being talked about is extremely limited. You can lend to one friend. One time. You can't pick two friends, not even serially, so once you've loaned one book to one friend, that's it...It is 'Sopie's Choice'," he told the Times.

Ah, but to lend once is better than never, right Jeff? As the BusinessInsider speculates, this could be Bezos positioning for multiple Kindle lending options in the future.

Smart positioning, if true, but to compare the Nook's one-friend-only sharing feature to an utterly depressing Nazi concentration camp book-turned-movie? Surely, we can find something more depressing to compare that book to, yes? How about we compare it to what happens to Amazon's bottom line when it sells an eBook?

Update: It needs to be noted that the interviewer suggested Sophie's Choice as a comparison, and then Bezos ran with it. Also of note, Bezos claimed that 48 Kindle versions sell for every 100 physical version of the same book. That's impressive, even if they're losing something like $2 per eBook. [NYT Magazine via BusinessInsider via Silicon Alley Insider's Twitter]

Step 1: Market a device for two whole years
Step 2: Issue a price drop a few months before the holiday season
Step 3: Remain the exclusive retailer for said device
Step 4: Profit! (To an extent that is completely and intentionally unclear to everyone!)

When Amazon tells you that the Kindle is the highest-selling product on Amazon, you're supposed to think of it as you'd think of anything else: as a strong, reliable metric in gauging how well a product is doing in general. The thing is, there is no "in general" for the Kindle. There is only Amazon. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop at Amazon has to make an exception. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop online has to make an exception. The Kindle didn't outsell the iPod Touch—not even close.

It's worth noting that, as always with the Kindle, Amazon is not giving us any sales numbers to look at. They've consistently claimed this is to protect competitive interests, which led journalists, and the public, the consistently believe that the figure must be kind of embarrassing. But with this exceedingly proud announcement, Amazon has revealed at least part of their reasoning: good PR. To proclaim that the Kindle has outsold every other product in the world (on Amazon!) makes it sound like the device is, at the very least, not a failure. Which it probably isn't! But let's look at what we really, honestly know: The Kindle outsold every other products in its parent company's online store, which has an exclusive on the device. We have no idea how many units are sold, nor do we have any idea how many Amazon expected to sell, or how many they'd need to sell for Kindle to be considered successful. We know that sales have gone up during a heavy shopping period, but that's about it. It's a closed system.

In other words, we know nothing new. Well, except that a certain other book store with a noticeably similar strategy and much hotter hardware is just about to show up piss-drunk at the Kindle's Christmas party, to try to steal its girlfriend. [Press Release]

As many Kindle owners already know, keeping a large number of books on the device can get a bit unruly—so this would be a welcome update. It's also good news for people on the fence about whether or not to get a Kindle or a Nook over the holidays. It appears that the Kindle is going to be the only game in town until after the new year. [Kindle Facebook via Gadgetell]

Qualcomm says it'll be up to the various manufacturers to create devices built on this reference design, but Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity would make multiplayer gaming pretty interesting. Just depends if ARM-based operating systems, like Android, get the right games.

The concept has a 5.7-inch display that uses Qualcomm's "mirasol" screen technology that provides better battery life and smooth video playback. Problem is, for now, this reference is just a static-image prototype. Yet another eReader angle that we'll be watching for you, though. [SlashGear]