“Kindle is 40 percent thinner, 10 percent lighter, with 2 times the battery life. It’s the best-selling, the most wished-for, and the most gifted product on Amazon across all product categories---not just electronics. Kindle manufacturing is humming, and the latest generation Kindle---just released in October---is in stock and available for immediate shipment today.” – Drew Herdener, Amazon PR guy, as quoted the New  York Times quoted him on the Nook. Of Kindles and pencils: Yes, that’s a Kindle 2 next to a pencil. I’m just curious if Amazon might be overdoing it. Would a somewhat thicker machine mean...

A $399 e-reader with an 8.1-inch E Ink screen will go on sale from iRex Technologies by next month---at hundreds of Best Buy stores, according to a report in the New York Times. No photos are on the Web yet. The one here is of an existing iRex model. A promising preview of the new one’s looks? 3G wireless Excerpt from Brad Stone’s Times article: “Owners of the new iRex DR800SG will be able to buy digital books and newspapers wirelessly over the 3G network of Verizon, which is joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting such...

ePub is “probably the publishers’ best defense against Amazon and the Kindle.” I’ve said similar things for a long time, and these days Mike Shatzkin, the publishing guru, is aboard. Way to go! Now, Mike, how about convincing Random House and the other biggies to pay for accelerated development of this IPDF standard? It isn’t enough to talk up ePub. The standard really does need to be good and ready for the future. The long-overdue creation of an ePub logo---ideally just for nonDRMed and social-DRMed books at first, so as to promote genuine compatibility---wouldn’t...

How can Sony and others beat the Kindle? Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo doesn’t just urge greater ease of use and other improvements? He also writes: I'd counsel Amazon's competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they'd be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he's got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I'd prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with...

This is from Yahoo! News and is part of DisplaySearch's E-Paper Displays Report (which is for purchase only). Be careful when looking at the overall figures because they include such items as mobile phones, electronic shelf labels, point-of-purchase and public signage displays, displays in smart and credit cards, clothes and other wearable items, and other applications. I've tried to separate out the ebook component. The number of e-book/e-text books (5-9.x") models went from one model in 2003-2004 to three in 2006, to about five in 2007. In 2009, the number of models jumped to about 20. The e-paper display...