“The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can stay on a page as long as they like and will be rewarded for every tap, tip, or swipe.

While I doubt appbooks will replace regular books or even regular e-books, there is certainly room for well-created apps that can help the learning process. This $7.99 app (with a free lite version) looks like a good example—as well as a great example of how stories in the public domain can be put to commercial use.

It looks like it might be fun to try out, but I don’t think it will fix one of my biggest annoyances with having a 1st-generation iPod Touch—the way that many of the apps I formerly relied upon are no longer available to me because their latest versions require iOS 4 or 5. I can no longer use Meebo or FourSquare because I lost the versions of the app from my iPod in a crash, the versions in iTunes are the more recent ones that work with my iPad, and I can’t download the older ones. I can’t download the latest version of Facebook, either.

It has been a couple of weeks since I received my TruConnect MiFi for Christmas, and I’ve used it enough to get a decent idea of how well it works. I use the MiFi mostly with my iPod Touch and iPad, though I have had the chance to try it with my laptop as well.

Fundamentally, the device works at a speed of 320 kilobits down, 100 kilobits up. Even if it weren’t for the per-megabyte bandwidth charges, this is not something you would want to use to watch YouTube movies, and streaming Netflix is right out of the question. (I tried streaming Pandora as an experiment, and it played half a song and then started having to buffer every few seconds.)

Indeed, anything more than simple web browsing and text chat seems remarkably slow. If you get one of these and use it for web browsing, you will probably want to use a browser such as Opera that supports a low-bandwidth “turbo” mode. (Of course, it’s all relative. Back in the ‘90s, to anyone stuck with a dial-up modem, 320/100 kilobits would have been heavenly speed.)

Signing up with the TruConnect service was relatively simple—or it should have been, save that there was some sort of problem creating my account the first time, and I had to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for them to reset the account so I could use it.

The service uses Sprint’s 3G mobile network, and charges $4.99 per month of use, plus 3.9 cents per megabyte of usage. The monthly charge only applies for months in which the device is used—though since I’m going to be using it pretty much every day, I can’t imagine I’ll ever go a month without being charged. It is a pre-paid service: they charge you $10 at a time to fill your account, then you use from that balance and they top up your account whenever your balance dwindles to $5. (They did accidentally charge me twice for my first top-up, but they noticed and corrected the issue themselves.)

My main use of the MiFi thus far has been for checking e-mail, loading RSS feeds into Reeder, and checking or updating Facebook and Twitter. It tends to take a while to get any results—I have to give it a minute or so for Facebook or Reeder to start to update. But as slow as it runs, I expect that’s fairly normal. The MiFi also lets me check in on Yelp, Facebook, or Foursquare, even from places that don’t have wifi of their own. I just need to be able to detect some other wireless network, and the iPod Touch or iPad’s geolocation service looks up its SSID to find out where I am.

When using it with my laptop, I can plug in the included USB cable to the device and use it as a USB 3G modem. This also lets it charge the battery, but turns wifi off so I can’t use it with my other gadgets. (I gather there may be a way to patch it so I can still use it with wifi at the same time, but I haven’t looked into that yet.) The first time it is connected to a computer, it will install a NovaTel USB connection utility off of internal storage, which allows the laptop to connect and monitors bandwidth usage.

While I have not actually used the device to download an e-book yet, I have little doubt I could do so easily with IOS 5’s integration of Safari with other apps for download purposes. Most e-books are small enough that they ought to download right away.

As far as battery life goes, it promises 4 hours of use or 40 of standby. I think that might be a little optimistic, but most of the time I’m able to get at least a couple of hours of continuous use out of it before it starts warning me of low battery power. For just checking on my breaks at work, or occasionally while I’m out and about, I can use it all day without problems. I do charge it overnight, every night.

There are a few things about the MiFi that I don’t like quite as much, however. For example, I’m not entirely sure why, but frequently when I’m using it with my iPod Touch or iPad I have to turn it off twice, because a second after the first time I turn it off, it comes right back on again. (I’m guessing this has something to do with the way the iOS devices maintain a wifi connection for a while even after I put them to sleep—perhaps the MiFi senses they’re trying to send something, and comes right back on again.) Sometimes it won’t turn off the second time, and I actually have to pop the battery out to get it to shut down. It also gets a little warm during use—not hot enough to burn, but certainly hot enough I can feel it in my pocket.

One other thing that’s slightly annoying is that the device came with a label on the bottom listing the default SSID and password (both of which I’ve since changed), just in case you have to reset the device to factory settings. However, within just a couple of days of carrying it in my pocket, that information had rubbed entirely off! Fortunately the device came with that information copied down on an insert card as well, and I copied it into my Evernote so I won’t lose it,

At any rate, I’m pretty happy with the device so far. The service can seem frustratingly slow at times, but then so can any 3G service. And when I consider that this lets me have iPhone-like mobile web access from my iPod Touch without having to pay an iPhone monthly contract fee, it’s worth every penny.

The Financial Times is known for its successful paywall strategy in which it allows readers eight free articles per month but requires they subscribe beyond that. It recently launched an HTML5 app for iOS devices and other tablets that allows it to interact directly with subscribers and bypass Apple’s 30% app store cut.

The news that its online revenues are set to overtake ad revenues suggests that the future of newspapers may not necessarily be so tightly bound to print after all.

The 32-page books feature a 16-page story divided into English and the language being taught (so far, French or Spanish), with read-aloud buttons to hear a native speaker read the story aloud in either language. The books are available as appbooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

[b small Managing Director Catherine] Bruzzone said, “Here at b small we’ve always sought a bright, fun, colorful and personal approach to supporting parents who want to bring foreign languages into their homes. These versions, with their bright illustrations, exciting stories and in-built bilingual audio, are the perfect package. I’m especially excited by what this could mean for other languages close to our hearts for which UK print quantities are often quite low, such as German, Italian, or even Chinese. These languages could easily be made available in this digital format with a native speaker.”

I wish they’d had something like this around when I was learning high school French. It seems like an excellent and eminently sensible use of multimedia technology for learning, and the digital nature of it means that it can easily be sold worldwide from just the one app store.

Amusingly, one of its listed benefits is

No Annoying Ads

Reading time is your time and you don’t want to be interrupted. NOOK lets you immerse yourself in your books, magazines, and newspapers without being distracted by annoying ads that appear in other Readers.

On TVTropes, that’s what we call a “Take That”.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Black Friday circular has leaked a couple of days early, giving a glimpse at what Apple will have on offer. The deals are about the same as last year, though a little better on higher-end devices.

The deals on the Mac end cover the iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, while the iPod nano and iPod touch are the discounted iPod offerings. The Macs will be $101 less, the iPads will go from $41-$61 discounts depending on capacity (16GB, 32GB, 64GB), the iPod nano will shave off $11 for both 8GB and 16GB storage sizes, the iPod touch will follow the iPad’s lead of bigger discounts for bigger capacities, ranging from $21-$41 discounts.

I’d be vaguely tempted if I had any money.

I’ll mention other e-reader deals if I see them.

But have you considered whether it’s a sanitary habit?

The Guardian’s books blog reports that one pediatric gastroenterologist was curious enough about the practice to issue a survey on the matter. Some doctors point out that the process can lead to germs from fecal matter being transferred to the medium you’re reading, which means they could then be transmitted to others.

Microbes don’t fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it’s likely bugs can live on those for hours. A recent study by Curtis suggests that in Britain one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter, largely because people fail to wash their hands after going to the toilet.

But the study on toilet reading suggests that it’s probably not a major issue—most people do it at home or work with their own reading material, not something that’s likely to have been contaminated by prior restroom users.

The intent of the survey was to determine whether toilet readers had an easier time going than non-readers, but the results were largely inconclusive. Regardless, people will undoubtedly continue to see literature as something convenient to do while they doo-doo.

Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the Caches directory include database cache files and downloadable content, such as that used by magazine, newspaper, and map applications.

The problem is that iOS 5 now “cleans” out the Caches and tmp directories when the device gets low on space. That means that if you tend to keep your device mostly full, adding that one more e-book or magazine could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back: suddenly all the content you had on your iOS device is gone.

A common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. (I think highly of my customers.) This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the cleaner, which — in the background, unbeknownst to her — deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty.

(Last week, almost this exact scenario happened to one of my customers.)

Ament explains that there is, at present, no place to store files that shouldn’t be backed up but also shouldn’t be randomly deleted.

Because e-books are so small, I tend to keep my entire library on my iPod Touch and my iPad at any given time. That’s hundreds of books, that took a long time to load on there the first time I synced them. I don’t like to think about them suddenly all disappearing again.

And Ament points out that the first impulse of readers who have this happen is going to be to blame not the operating system but the developers of the app.

Hopefully Apple fixes this problem quickly—but sometimes it’s hard to know whether it’s even paying attention. (Does this restriction affect Apple’s own e-book and magazine apps, I wonder?)

(Found via Jeff Kirvin.)

As I mentioned back in April, there have not yet been any serious contenders to knock the iPod Touch off its throne as best pocket-sized mini-tablet, but the specs on the Galaxy Player 4.0 and 5.0 look impressive at least on paper. Will they make good pocket-sized e-readers, though? I would be interested to hear from anyone who’s had the chance to play with them. Who knows…perhaps my next pocket-sized device won’t be an iPod Touch after all.

Alas, Apple doesn’t have much to offer in the way of refurbished iPod Touches right now. It does have a 64 GB 2009 (3rd-generation) model for $249. Lots of storage, but it’s the generation prior to the new retina display—still decent for e-reading, but not as good as later models.

Of course, the one drawback shared by all these devices is that they come from Apple, land of the walled garden where they like to change the rules every so often. But if you can deal with that annoyance, Apple does still make great hardware.

There was no new iPhone 5, though the iPhone 4S is basically that in everything but name. It includes the new Siri voice-command technology, and is also compatible with both 3G and CDMA networks—so for the first time you could take your iPhone from one carrier to the other without needing to buy a new device. (The lack of an “iPhone 5” nonetheless caused Apple’s stock to drop by 5% after the show, however.)

The (old-style display) iPhone 3GS is now going to be available for free with contract, with the 8GB iPhone 4 costing $99 and iPhone 4S going up from there. That could get e-reading capable devices into a few more hands, too, though I’d tend to call the 3GS a bad bargain—when you compare the overall price of a 2 year contract, you’re really just saving a pittance, and getting a low-resolution screen out of it.

iOS 5, a free download on 10/12 to those with devices that can support it, will include Apple’s new e-magazine and newspaper store, Newsstand, though given that we knew this was coming already it’s not exactly news. iCloud will give everyone 5GB of cloud storage, with extra space available for yearly fees, and will allow PC-less wireless syncing—PCs will no longer be necessary to own iOS devices, it seems.

There’s also a new AppleCare+ plan for $99 that includes coverage of accidental damage—so if you drop your iPod Touch and break the screen, you’re covered.

Contrary to expectations, Apple is not killing off the iPod Classic yet, so people who need to carry 160 GB of media in their pocket are safe for another year.

Those who want to view the keynote for themselves can find it in a Quicktime stream on Apple’s web site. CNet has a slide show covering all the changes in the iPod line and their current pricing. TechCrunch has a great set of articles covering the entire keynote, too.

If anyone can think of any implications for e-books that I’ve missed, I’d definitely like to hear about them.

Yesterday Gizmodo took a look at some of the complaints and erroneous predictions of low sales surrounding the original device, and pointed out a CNet review by Elliot Van Buskirk predicting that descendants of the iPod might replace the PC.

The funny thing is, even Van Buskirk didn’t get it quite right. He was focusing on the way that the iPod could also act as a 5 gig portable Firewire hard drive, allowing people to schlep huge files around easily. Van Buskirk saw the iPod as being a precursor to a bigger portable hard drive that people could connect to any device they wanted in order to use the files therein: “If I’m right […], people will use one comprehensive iPod-like storage and connectivity unit in combination with every specialized peripheral you can think of.”

And while the iPod did indeed see some of that sort of use (most notably, it was used for transferring digital copies of footage from New Zealand to England for special-effects work on the Lord of the Rings movies), its contribution to the “replacement of the PC” really came when it transformed into the iPhone and iPod Touch, which eventually led to the iPad and the rise of the tablet that followed.

As for portable hard drives, we now have USB thumb drives with many times the capacity of that original iPod at a much smaller size, and they don’t come with the vulnerability of physical hard drives to shock and jostling that leads them inexorably to fail sooner or later. But those don’t show any sign of “replacing the PC”.

And now the iPod Classic is apparently ready to follow its originator Steve Jobs out the door. It seems kind of fitting, in a way, that the Classic goes out at the same time as the man who transformed Apple when he introduced it to the world. I can’t wait to see what the future looks like.

But the fact that Apple is staying away from that market niche has been allowing others to exploit it without fear of competition—in particular, the Nook Color and now the Kindle Fire. They’re being marketed as media consumption devices rather than tablets—indeed, as PC Magazine points out, Amazon is very careful not to use the word “tablet” in conjunction with the Fire itself, although everybody else throws it around with abandon.

I find it interesting that nobody seems to have twigged to the fact that Apple already does have, in a sense, a Kindle Fire competitor: the iPod Touch. Allowing for the different aspect ratio of the Fire, it has (and for that matter the Nook Color and the Kobo Vox also have) almost exactly the same resolution as the current retina display iPod Touch. It’s just that it has that resolution in a 7” screen instead of a 3.5” one. So the Fire is effectively the device you’d have if you took the current iPod Touch and made it twice as tall and wide without changing the actual resolution.

The basic iPod Touch has 8 GB of internal memory just like the Fire, a few features the Fire lacks such as a camera, and costs about $30 more. It can do most of the same media playing or e-reading tricks (it can run the Netflix client, for instance, for streaming on-line video), and it has a small-screen optimized browser (though not one so advanced as Silk). Its screen is just as good, but smaller—so you might have to hold it closer to your face, but you still see just as good a picture as the Fire will give you in a device that’s a quarter the size.

If Apple ever does come out with a 7” tablet (and you never know, Jobs often pooh-poohs things before Apple turns around and comes out with them—for example, e-book stores), it’ll probably do so by blowing up the iPod Touch, not by shrinking the iPad—and the purpose of it will probably be spun the same as the iPod’s: a pure media-playing device, not meant for “real” work.

Ars Technica looks at the rumor and finds the reasoning behind it sound. Thanks to the emergence of cloud-based services, there is no longer as much need to carry a 160GB hard drive full of music around in your pocket.

When you have an iPod touch and a Spotify Premium account, for example, you suddenly have access to more music than what would fit onto that 160GB hard drive in the first place. And with the pending rollout of iCloud, any iTunes purchase you make can show up on your iOS device without your having to plug in and sync every time. Simply put, the iPod classic can only compete with its newer iPod siblings on storage space and virtually nothing else, and even that is becoming a less important element to music players over time.

Given that Amazon played the no-plug-ins-required card in its launch of the Fire, it is more and more clear what direction these things are moving. (Indeed, I’ve been listening to Pandora on my PC as I write this—but I’m as likely to listen to it on my iPod Touch instead if I’m doing something like laundry where I’d be moving around a lot but still staying within the wifi zone.)

What does this mean for e-reading? Well, for one thing, it means that the “default” iPod will be the iPod Touch from now on (though you could argue on a sales basis that it already has been for the last couple of years), which is a device capable of displaying e-books and displaying them very well.

I often think that tablets and larger e-readers come in for a disproportionate share of attention on the e-reading front. After all, you might read a book-sized e-reader in your easy chair in the evening, but you might read from something small enough to fit in your pocket at any spare moment wherever you are. And people tend to have more spare moments than they do easy chair time. The Kindle and Nook might be winning readers’ hearts and minds, but the Kindle and Nook apps on an iPod Touch or iPhone might, more importantly, win their pockets.

In fact, it’s easy to forget that before and even in the early days of the Kindle, the iPhone (and iPod Touch) was the hottest new e-reading gizmo on the block. Even Forbes took notice. Just because the Kindle subsequently kicked in the afterburners and took off like a rocket doesn’t mean that the iPod Touch form factor can be counted out of the running.

And with every new iPod an iPod Touch (except for the few that are iPod Nanos, of course), there are still plenty of opportunities to get people into e-reading who wouldn’t think of buying a Kindle. Even if Apple’s walled-garden approach to in-app purchases is grating, at least the company didn’t shut e-reading out altogether.

The wifi keyboard version is priced exactly the same as the new Touch wifi version, and the 3G keyboard version is only $10 less than the 3G Touch (or the same without ads). Given that you can order a $79 ad-supported Kindle right now, it’s hard to imagine this offer appealing to anyone save for die-hard physical keyboard admirers. On the other hand, it does give Amazon room to discount even further as the holiday season approaches.

Meanwhile, Amazon is playing coy about the 10” Fire device rumored to be in the offing for next year. Writes Tim Stevens for Engadget:

We just asked Amazon Kindle vice president (and thinking man) Russ Grandinetti when we might expect a larger successor. With a smile, Russ said "Stay tuned," and left it at that. If you’ll recall, RIM’s Ryan Biden told us at a past Engadget Show that there was "no reason" the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook couldn’t be shipped in a different size, and given recent rumors that both outfits were working with Quanta, it’s not too tough to read betwixt the lines.

Stevens also reports Amazon gave the same response about the Fire’s international release since its November launch is US-only.

Launching the 7” version now and the 10” version later is a pretty clever move on Amazon’s part. It manages to avoid a direct comparison to the larger, costlier iPad, and instead casts the Fire perhaps as more of an upgraded e-reader. They’re not trying to compete on the full-sized tablet market…yet.

And even when the 10” one comes out, they’ll probably call it the “Fire DX” and cast it as an improvement over the Kindle DX rather than an iPad competitor. It’s a truism of the market that “you can’t beat Apple at tablets,” so they’re trying to come in under the radar as a “color e-reader” instead. (It reminds me of the approach taken in the novel Cyberbooks by Ben Bova, in which the protagonist marketed his e-reader as an electronic toy after the publishing industry showed no interest in marketing it as an electronic book.)

Indeed, if it does compete directly against any Apple product, it is most likely the iPod Touch. When you consider that for $30 less than the price of the lowest-end iPod Touch you can get a wifi-capable color multimedia device with the same 8GB memory but four times the screen real estate…heck, it’s starting to tempt me. (Though the Fire does only have half the pixel density of the current “retina display” iPod Touch, so about the same overall screen resolution despite the bigger size.)

It may not really be fair to consider the Fire an “Android Tablet”, however. Its ecosystem is going to be as closed in its own way as Apple’s is: no access to any app store except Amazon’s own and a complete reskinning to remove most traces of the Android underpinnings mean that it can’t really be directly compared to most other Android devices.