Ever since the decline of its original Palm line heralded the end of the true “PDA”, the various properties that once made up Palm have been the digital equivalent of hot potatoes. Consider Peanut Press, which started out as an independent e-bookstore, was owned by Palm for a while under the name “Palm Digital Media”, was spun off to NetLibrary and renamed “eReader”, and was eventually bought by competitor Fictionwise—which was then bought by Barnes & Noble to form the basis of its Nook e-readers. Now the latest anonymous rumor has it that the remnants of Palm itself, currently...

Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

The big story in the world of tablets and e-readers that broke this weekend involves the HP TouchPad. A sort of chain reaction took place starting when a big box retailer shipped hundreds of thousands of unsold units back to HP, which suddenly found itself swimming in unwanted tablets. The sales figures were spectacularly unimpressive: that retailer only managed to sell 25,000 out of the 270,000 tablets it ordered, and deal site Woot only sold 612 of them when it offered them for $120 off earlier this month. The sales figures remind me of the much-maligned JooJoo from...

Sometimes it can be fun to watch expert prognosticators go back and recount the mistakes they have made. Mike Shatzkin has a post like that, focusing on two predictions he made that, in retrospect, turned out not to be valid. Shatzkin got into e-books at about the same time and in the same way I did: reading them on his Palm Pilot back in the late 1990s. He watched the first few waves of dedicated e-readers fail miserably, and concluded that people simply wouldn’t be interested in reading on a device too large to fit in a hip pocket....

A couple of weeks ago I covered Autography, a prototype system for autographing digital books involving an iPad 2. Now Barnes & Noble is about to release an upgrade to the Nook reader that will allow Nook owners to have authors sign their e-books using a stylus. (Presumably via the touch-sensitive color LCD screen portion of the reader.) Interestingly, eReader (which Barnes & Noble bought) long allowed authors to do something similar using an Easter Egg function of the Palm PDA reader client. I wonder if that’s what gave B&N the idea? At any rate, for Nook owners...

Back in November, I mentioned that Salon Magazine was seeking a buy-out or merger. The magazine was subsequently involved in talks with Michael Wolff of Newser.com, but the New York Times’s DealBook section reports that the talks have collapsed in the wake of the Huffington Post sale. Apparently the high $315 million selling price of the Post caused Salon’s board members to wonder whether they were pricing the magazine too low. Salon Magazine was one of the first magazines to recognize the potential of e-reading, strongly influencing me to take my first step into e-reading technology with the purchase...

Our sister blog Gadgetell points out that it’s been just over a year since we first saw Steve Jobs come on stage with his clipboard-sized wonder tablet the iPad and show us for the first time just what it was capable of and how much it cost. Since then, the device has proceeded to redefine what we thought of as a tablet—certainly there had been tablets before, but none of them exactly set the world on fire. The iPad, on the other hand, did set the world on fire, opening up new possibilities for reading not only e-books, but...

Back in January, I blogged on my personal journal about how “even in the information age, nothing beats getting carded.” I observed at the time that even in this age of digital bits freely flowing back and forth, when so many other paper forms of communication are beginning to be endangered by e-quivalents, and ten years after the Palm’s infrared beaming was supposed to supersede it, the humble business card continues to be extremely useful. Now the Washington Post has taken notice of the phenomenon, with an in-depth look at how business cards are still being used today....

Pre Central reports on an interesting tip that has come in from an anonymous tipster concerning Palm’s next smartphone, codenamed “Mansion”. Whether this Mansion has many rooms, apparently none of them will be locked—because unlike the Pre, this device will not have any keys—making it the first Palm device without a hardware keypad since the company phased out the last of its original line of PDAs. Certainly, leaving out a keyboard might be a good way to lower the price on the already inexpensive Pre line. And Palm is no stranger to making devices without hardware keyboards,...

Several reports on forthcoming or no longer forthcoming hardware hit the news yesterday. Most notable is the report from Nick Bilton at the New York Times “Bits” blog that notes the Kindle is just the beginning of the range of devices Amazon wants to invent to make it easy to purchase digital content of all kinds, not just e-books. According to anonymous sources, Amazon’s “Lab 126”, the division responsible for the Kindle, was originally intended to create lots of projects, though it has focused solely on the Kindle so far. “Jeff’s original goal for...

I’ve talked about PADDs before, the hand-held touch-sensitive tablet computers used in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I mentioned Jeff Kirvin’s remarks about it in regard to the Palm device that later became the Pre, and subsequently compared my new iPod Touch to the device. Now Ars Technica has interviewed production designers Michael and Denise Okuda and Doug Drexler from TNG as well as design staff from other Star Trek shows about the design process that led to their imagination of the device to which the iPad is only just catching up, 23 years later. It is...

Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...