And this is why I try very hard not to report on rumors. Last week I wrote about a rumor that Microsoft was considering buying the Nook Media division. Well, the rumor was good for Barnes & Noble stock, which spiked up to $22 a share the day the rumor was announced, and then continued up to almost $24 a share later in the week. (Today it's down to $21.) However, as with many rumors, this one has now been dispelled (maybe, assuming dispelling the "rumor" isn't just part of the big plan.) Insider Monkey says they had an email on Friday...

Here it is at last, folks—a brand new operating system for the iGeneration! Straight from the market’s leading software manufacturer, specifically designed for tablets and smartphones, it’s free from all that tiresome text and crammed with brightly-colored blobs! Move them around, tap them, press them, fondle them! It’s a whole new way of interacting with your phone, your PC, your fridge, your spouse! Yes, it’s here, it’s now, it’s the revolutionary innovation of 2011—it’s Unity! Wait ... what? You thought I was talking about Windows 8? Sorry, folks, but for those of us who embrace the Linux way of life, all...

  One of the true innovators of the reading of text on screen, Bill Hill, died yesterday. Hill will be remembered primarily as one of the inventors of Microsoft‘s ClearType screen typography system, but his impact on our screen experience spanned a quarter century. Robert Scoble, who interviewed Hill many times, says that Hill worked behind-the-scenes, but was “one of the greats.” Hill started out as a newspaper writer for 20 years in Scotland. In 1986 he joined Aldus on their seminal PageMaker layout program. He was approached by Microsoft in 1994 to run its typography group. He left Microsoft in 2009 and worked on screen-reading...

ZDNet's Microsoft reporter, Mary Jo Foley, has something of a rumor-piece posted that's definitely worth a read ... at least for those of you interested in staying abreast of the latest self-publishing services and active-reading apps. Here's the takeaway, beginning with a little background info: After settling a patent dispute back in April, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble formed "a new venture to focus on e-reading and the education market." On April 30, according to a Microsoft press release, the two companies announced both "a strategic partnership" and a new e-book subsidiary, Newco, which "will bring together the digital and College businesses of...

This seems to be a Jeff Bezos news day. While it’s not directly related to e-books, it’s still worth mentioning that Bezos has donated $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage, an advocacy group working to uphold Washington state’s laws allowing same-sex marriage. CNet reports: Bezos became involved in the campaign after a former Amazon employee who is now working as a volunteer fundraiser asked him to help out. He responded to her by e-mail saying, "Jen, this is right for so many reasons. We're in for $2.5 million. Jeff & MacKenzie," according to the Associated...

Vanity Fair has an article on Microsoft’s corporate culture, and some ways in which that culture crippled innovation at the company. One of those ways is responsible for Microsoft—and Bill Gates in particular—rejecting a prototype for a touchscreen e-reader—in 1998. According to [writer Kurt] Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. “He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project...

On Pando Daily, Farhad Manjoo discusses why Microsoft felt the need to build the Microsoft Surface itself, rather than farming Windows tablets out to an OEM. He casts the explanation in terms of the trackpad on your laptop or netbook. Because Apple builds its own hardware, it is able to make the trackpad on its Macbook computers perfectly responsive in a way that Windows hardware manufacturers never can. Because Windows-based computers are built from commodity parts, the touchpad just doesn’t cut it much of the time. Why does any of this matter? Because PC makers’ inability...

After the build-up of yesterday’s invitation and attendant rumor, today’s Microsoft event promised to be exciting (even if it turned out Barnes & Noble would not actually be involved). And true to form, Microsoft announced…a tablet. A Windows 8 tablet, in fact. Or, indeed, two of them. The Microsoft Surface will come in a regular version powered by an ARM processor, or a “Pro” version rocking a Core i5 x86 processor with either 64 or 128 gigabytes of storage. Both versions will run Windows 8—the same Windows 8 as your desktop PC, putting it one up on Apple if...

In April, Microsoft and B&N entered into a “strategic partnership” with no official name (but referred to as “Newco”). Now it looks like one of the fruits of that partnership may be announced tomorrow afternoon at a Microsoft event in Los Angeles. TechCrunch’s Peter Ha reports hearing from unknown sources that this event will announce a joint Microsoft/Barnes & Noble tablet which could be the first non-Xbox device that can stream from Microsoft’s Xbox Live on-line streaming service. Ha noted that, unlike previous invitations, the one for this event carried absolutely no specific product-line branding, simply calling it “a major Microsoft...

Former publishing-industry executive and subsequent business-sales-focused lawyer Martin Levin has a very interesting post on Publishing Perspectives looking at the economic theory of “creative destruction” and what it might mean for the publishing industry. In a nutshell, “creative destruction” means that as new business models are created, they effectively destroy the older models. Levin brings up a number of examples of publishing businesses and assets that have lost considerable value over the last few years. HarperCollins bought religious publisher Thomas Nelson for $200 million in 2011, but its prior owner, Intermedia, had paid $473 million for it only five...

Australian bargain site Cudo is offering, for 8 more hours at the time of this posting, a $99 budget e-book reader bundled with a CD of 4,000 written works—whose list of titles includes hundreds of works that are verifiably still within copyright, and enough duplicates and wrong author-title matches that it looks as though the seller simply grabbed the highest-ranked e-book torrents off any site they could find. I have to agree with John Scalzi here: this is some pure, high-quality premium-grade stupid, soliciting a list of so many copyrighted titles on a major bargains site like that. Add...

Earlier this year, Microsoft sued Barnes & Noble for patent infringement over its use of Android in the Nook Color. (I somehow missed this when it happened, so didn’t know about it when I posted this article more recently about Microsoft’s Android patent licensing deals.) But this week, an interesting new document emerged as evidence in the case: a 29-page slide deck from Barnes & Noble presenting the problems with Microsoft’s patent stance. The site that presented the slides, GeekWire, is down right now (presumably due to the heavy bandwidth demand from all 29 of those pictures being downloaded...