Now the latest anonymous rumor has it that the remnants of Palm itself, currently in the hands of Hewlett-Packard, might end up with Barnes & Noble’s bitterest rival. VentureBeat reports hearing from a “well-placed source” that HP is looking to sell Palm, and Amazon is the likeliest of several contenders to buy the company.

Might Amazon want to move away from its (all-but-unrecognizable) Android derivative and use WebOS instead? Amazon does have the advantage of being primarily a content company—the exact opposite of Apple, whose business is solely hardware. It’s made its e-reader app available for every mobile OS it could, including WebOS. The whole reason Amazon is subsidizing each Fire by an estimated $50 per unit is to get hardware capable of viewing its content in the hands of as many people as possible, so all those people have a reason to buy from its store.

In a way, Amazon could well look upon the spate of $99 TouchPads as a sort of precursor to its own Fire launch in that respect: Cheap hardware, Kindle app, many hands. (Of course, I don’t think there’s a WebOS client for Amazon’s streaming video services yet, as there will be for the Fire, but who knows what the future might hold?)

So, from Amazon’s point of view, it shouldn’t matter what the cheap hardware has under the hood. It’s already committed to supporting as many platforms as widely as possible. Android, WebOS, iOS, Windows Phone, partridge-in-a-pear-tree—as long as the device can read Kindle e-books (and presumably, at some point, watch Amazon Prime movies), everything’s golden. And given all the patent turbulence around Android lately (why, again, is Samsung paying Microsoft royalties for using a Google OS?), perhaps Amazon is looking for a safe harbor in case it has to ditch Android altogether due to IP considerations.

Of course, it might not even be the WebOS operating system Amazon wants. Slashgear speculates Amazon might be more interested in the tablet hardware designs that had been in the pipeline until the TouchPad’s unceremonious flop. Amazon has already shown itself capable of repurposing one failed hardware design, given that the Fire is essentially a rebranded BlackBerry PlayBook. Why not scoop up more fire-sale bargains? It’s also not outside the realm of possibility that Amazon might be interested in Palm’s patent portfolio, given that Palm essentially single-handedly invented the PDA (though surely most of its original patents would be past or near their expiration dates).

But even after all that speculation, we should still bear in mind that this is based on an anonymously-sourced rumor—and even if the rumor is true at this moment, business deals we never even hear about fall through all the time. Perhaps the best thing to take from this is that Amazon is not going to rest on its laurels but will keep looking for new ways to improve its product and service offerings. But then, we already knew that.

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 to restock the public domain. We get more into direct self- and e-publishing matters in the further segments.

Me: I’d like to start by asking: how did you get into self-publishing?

Michael: Well, probably the very first stuff I was self-publishing was my how-to-write newsletter, The Secrets, which I taught classes at GenCon and other conventions for many years and decided to do a newsletter. Decided to make it Internet subscription only, so starting about 7, 8 years ago I was doing this bi-weekly newsletter as PDFs. So that was the very first thing that I did. Right there I realized the possibilities for doing this.

Many years ago I had gotten Apple Newtons and gone through a series of Palm Pilots and every time with the Apple Newtons, with the Palm Pilots, always get the software that would allow me to make electronic books that would work on those devices. Because again I just found it fascinating, and found that huge potential there.

You fast-forward to the Kindle coming out and now all the tablets and all the dedicated readers and suddenly all that potential that I was seeing those many years ago both had devices that made it easier for other people to use and also put in place marketplaces that suddenly made it possible to have an economy based on selling your own work.

Me: It’s funny, you know, those of us who’ve been reading e-books ever since the nineties had gotten to the point of despairing that anybody would ever be interested, and finally Jeff Bezos came along and basically single-handedly created the e-book market.

Michael: Right. You know, I really thought when the Newton came out, because it had on more reader software—I really had high hopes for that. And then when Apple abandoned the Newton and didn’t do anything else to follow that up and didn’t keep that software alive, I felt that that was unfortunate.

And then the software that was being used to make books for the Palm Pilot—unfortunately the company that put it out hit on the plan of charging a royalty for the authors who used their software. [eReader, nee Peanut Press. When Fictionwise bought the company, it discontinued this practice. —CM] And I absolutely balk at that. I mean, this is like the guy who built your house having a percentage every time you sell it. No, no, this job was done along time ago! So I didn’t like that.

So again, now we finally do have both a means to make it convenient for people and an economic structure that makes it very viable for authors to be able to do things, even original things, which is kind of cool.

Me: Yeah, it’s funny that eventually one of the companies that was using eReader’s, or rather Peanut Press’s software back then eventually bought it.

Michael: Right.

Me: And that was Fictionwise, and they completely opened it up, but by then it was kind of too late.

Michael: It was, and down through the years I’ve gotten in touch with Fictionwise and what they wanted for an author to self-publish was they wanted you to have at least ten things—ten novels or whatever—that you were going to be able to bring to that. And even as a published novelist who owns the rights to certain things, I didn’t have and I really didn’t think anybody else was going to have a catalog of books that we’d be able to toss out there just ready to go.

I also think I didn’t like the terms of their contracts—and fortunately we’ve seen the exclusives aspects of contracts going away now, which is good. That’ s always just been stupid. Especially when you’re watching new formats and new platforms come out, why would you sign something away forever when you know in the next week somebody may come up with a brand new thing that will be the new hot thing, and suddenly you’ve signed those rights away. That doesn’t make any sense.

Me: Uh-huh. And certainly one of the big issues in publishing right now is the percentage of royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: With a lot of publishers balking at giving any kind of high percentage royalties on backlist e-books, and then there’s Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble offering 65 to 70% royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: And so we’ve actually seen estates of major authors like Ian Fleming and Catherine Cookson and so forth taking their backlists directly to Amazon.

Michael: More important than that is you’ve got J.K. Rowling doing electronic books herself. There it’s not even an estate, it is an author who still retains those right who just says, hey, look, I can do more and I can do better than the publishers can.

Me: Uh-huh, and it’s also kind of impressive that she’s going to be doing it without restrictive digital rights management.

Michael: Right.

Me: Basically it’s kind of funny, because all the people—including me—who’ve been complaining about for the longest time expected that when she did eventually come out with them they’d be in the same digital rights management formats that everybody uses and everybody who knows how cracks.

Michael: That’s it, that’s always been my response—whenever another author says to me, “What do you do with DRM?” it’s like, why? You know [it’ll get broken] the second you put it on—I’m not smarter than people who can crack this stuff. I use a form of “moral DRM” which just says, hey look, if you enjoyed this, come on, shoot me a couple of bucks. It’s a fair exchange. My feeling is that if you’re going to use my product for entertainment, and I give you five hours of entertainment, it’s really not too much for me to ask you to give me five bucks.

Me: I remember back in the early 2000s you wrote sort of a treatise on piracy in which you challenged would-be pirates to scan some rare out-of-print public domain works rather than the works that were readily pirated.

Michael: Right, right. Because I think, look, if you’re going to run a scanner, if you’re going to do that sort of thing and you can look at Project Gutenberg as basically doing that, then gosh, just do something useful. Bring a lot of this stuff back in. There’s some fantastic early science fiction which is out there and I love getting this stuff and reading it all to find—oh, this is the guy that Edgar Rice Burroughs was reading before I got to reading my stuff.

Me: I’m a big fan of Maurice Leblanc myself, the Arsène Lupin novels.

Michael: Oh sure, yeah.

Me: And it really depresses me that so many of them were written after 1923, and they may never get into the public domain, Mickey Mouse being what he is.

Michael: Well, ’23 shouldn’t be a problem. It’s about ’63, ’64. If your book was printed after Walt Disney died, the copyright is never going to get broken. If Walt Disney predeceased the author, it’s never going to come out. Doesn’t mean authors can’t make available, but…

Me: I find myself hoping eventually the public wakes up to what a travesty this extension of copyright is and does something about it, but it’s probably a pipe dream.

Michael: To be quite honest, I think the better place to attack it is not with the public because the public doesn’t pay attention to those things. I think the better place to attack it is with the authors. Think about the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a number of other billionaires have all gotten together and pledged [that] while they’ll set some money aside for their heirs, they will donate the vast majority of their money to charitable stuff.

You could probably start a movement among authors to say, “I’m going to give orders to my literary estate that after I’m dead I’m going to let my work put my kids or grandkids through college. But twenty-five years after I die it goes into the public domain. And I think working with authors to do that is a lot more reasonable—a smaller audience and target audience that is going to be susceptible and reasonable to that particular thing. The reason you’ll never get a change in legislation is because Senators and Representatives write books.

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 Fusion Garage, which reportedly only managed to get 90 people to pre-order its tablet.

As a result, HP decided it will no longer make devices based on WebOS, the operating system it inherited when it bought struggling smartphone-maker Palm last year. (I guess the Palm Pilot really is dead at last.) Licensing it to other device makers is not out of the question, though I wonder after this performance whether any other device makers would really want it.

And as for those tablets it was swimming in, HP has held a fire sale, pricing the 16 GB version at $99 and the 32 GB version at $149. It will also be issuing refunds to those few hardy souls who paid full price for the device. You wouldn’t expect people to be flocking to buy discontinued hardware, but reportedly the tablets have been selling out fast—so fast, in fact, that it crashed HP’s e-commerce servers on Saturday afternoon.

Joe Wilcox at BetaNews points out that the incredible demand for these cheap tablets suggests there is a considerable level of consumer demand for an inexpensive tablet device. We’ve mentioned this before, as when I covered a survey that showed most people wanted Amazon’s tablet to cost less than $250. At less than $100, it’s not surprising they’re flying off the shelves.

Wilcox also notes that, while Apple’s iPad will continue riding high, the sudden glut of cheap competitors on the market could seriously bite into sales of less-successful iPad competitors like Samsung’s, Motorola’s, and RIM’s offerings. This could end up reinforcing Apple’s domination of the tablet market.

Meanwhile, $99-$149 for an inexpensive tablet running a proven OS from a well-known manufacturer certainly beats the pants off all of the cheap Chinese trash offerings that were previously all that price point had to offer. As a friend of mine noted while discussing it, given the e-reading apps available for WebOS you could simply consider it a “cheap color Kindle” and treat the rest of its functionality as a bonus.

It’s going to be interesting to see what this does to the rest of the tablet market—and what would-be iPad competitor will be the next to fall.

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. He expected the Kindle to be more of the same, but instead it proved successful enough to give the e-book market the jump start it had been needing.

His other mistake had to do with the idea that on-line communities would make natural marketplaces that businesses could target for sales—for example, that publishers could get into direct sales of e-books to their customers, rather than selling them through the various on-line stores. But the failure of OpenSky’s original business model, aimed at doing just that kind of direct-to-community selling, started to change his mind, and then he encountered this article suggesting that the philosophy behind J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore site will lead to market fragmentation as people have to go to separate places to find the books they want. Rowling will probably sell fewer copies of the Harry Potter e-books through Pottermore than she would have through the on-line bookstores, Shatzkin posits, because it misses out on the people who would have snagged the books as low-hanging fruit from the on-line stores they were shopping already but can’t be bothered to go seek them out from someplace else.

Shatzkin does point out that there are some companies—F+W Media, Interweave, and O’Reilly are the examples he mentions—that successfully sell direct to on-line communities (he could have mentioned Baen, as well, but for some reason nobody ever does), but points out that they are all specialized cases that may not be applicable to publishers in general. (And I must admit that Baen, being a relatively small-scale SF publishing imprint, probably is too.) He nonetheless hopes that Google’s e-book sales program could lead to the development of more individualized, community-targeted stores that can help publishing sell more in aggregate by reaching out to particular communities that are not as well served by the major stores.

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 this could be a rather better way to do book autographs than the complicated Autography system that would involve social networking and downloading and various rigamarole on the part of the author. Nook owners could just activate the autograph function, hand the stylus over, and get the signature. Just like with a paper book.

Which in turn makes buying a Nook start to look more attractive to “serious” e-bibliophiles. The wi-fi model is becoming available for $80 refurbished now and then, after all…

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 of a Palm Pilot. It was also one of the first magazines I read on AvantGo, one of the early precursors to RSS and read-it-later e-reading apps, on that Palm Pilot. It’s still out there on the web, features at least three RSS feeds, and the @Salon twitter feed makes a great candidate for importing into Flipboard for magazine-style browsing.

But as others have pointed out, it seems to have lost something over the years. Many of its best editors and columnists have drifted away, and what remains seems a little tawdry. Glancing over the front page at the moment, I see headlines like “Why I left my children”, “The twisted world of ‘ex-girlfriend porn’”, and my favorite, “Assassin can’t remember shooting RFK, wants parole.” Ah, Salon of my youth, hard-hitting political and insightful technological chronicler, what became of you?

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 also e-papers and e-magazines. A year later, other tablet makers are only just starting to catch up.

On Gadgetell, JG Mason suggests that the major reason for this might have been the apps. There’s a reason that “there’s an app for that” has become such a hackneyed phrase that Apple trademarked it. Because odds are, there is an app for that. (Unless, of course, “that” is something adult-oriented.)

Sure the hardware is great and is married to good software; but its the apps that make the product shine.  As an iOS user, I have no issue dropping less than $2 a few times a week.  My experience with Android and her apps twist my need to control the device, alter settings and my app use reflects that – and I hate paying for software customization apps.  Weird right?

For e-reading, the iPad offers all the versatility of the iPhone plus a larger screen size, so people willing to put up with reading from LCD find they have plenty of choices in how to do it: iBooks, Amazon, eReader, Nook, Kobo…the possibilities go on and on. And there are ways to read magazines, RSS feeds, social network feeds, and other methods of Internet reading that have never been seen before.

I’ll admit that I can sometimes wax overenthusiastic about the iPad and Apple gizmos in general. But they’re just so darned easy to use, and offer a great user interface, I think I have good reason to be. Anyway, let someone else come out with something anywhere near as revolutionary as the iPad, and I’ll enthuse all over that, too.

But enthusiastic or not, I honestly think the iPad has done a lot for the e-book industry over the last few months. Perhaps as much as the Kindle in some ways. If people were going to buy a single-use device for reading e-books, yes, the Kindle was what they’d choose. But the Kindle can’t do much other than read e-books. The iPad, on the other hand, has a whole raft of non-e-book-related uses, and if someone who buys one for those other uses and tries an e-book finds himself hooked, well, that’s one more customer for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or whoever.

(Just as was the case with the iPhone, and for that matter the original Palm Pilot PDA. Though neither of those accomplished anything on quite the iPad’s scale)

Now the Washington Post has taken notice of the phenomenon, with an in-depth look at how business cards are still being used today. Over the last three years, Staples reports, business card demand has seen double-digit growth. People are still using business cards, now more than ever. Nobody’s yet come up with anything that can replace them.

"There is something incredibly genius about the business card performing a single function very well," said Ted Striphas, author of "The Late Age of Print" and a communications professor at Indiana University. "It works right every time."

In a way it makes sense: any solution that relies on technology would require both people in the transaction to have the same technology. This was one of the things that relegated the Palm’s much-vaunted “beaming” little more than a fad, silly TV commercials notwithstanding.

The Post also points out that business cards can serve the purpose of “self-branding”—adding that extra little touch that makes you memorable to the person you gave it to. Even if people end up using a scanner or camera to transfer the information from the card into their contacts files, the card itself still carries the information in a much more portable and timely manner than having to write it down.

Even if the e-book makes paper books obsolete, I suspect that business cards are going to be with us for a very long time.

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, even if they haven’t done so for a long time.

The final name for the 800×480-resolution device has yet to be announced. Perhaps in keeping with the theme of prefixes, they could name it the “Post”.

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 the lab was to build a range of other devices,” said one person, referring to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. “There was talk of music players and other electronics.”

However, a number of job postings indicate Amazon may now be in the process of expanding. Nearly 80 job openings in various positions were listed in the company’s hardware division, and its earlier acquisition of multitouch company Touchco suggests there are touchscreens in Amazon’s future.

And CNet reports that Plastic Logic has finally driven a stake through the heart of the Que, its large e-ink tablet that was one of the most anticipated e-reading gadgets until the iPad usurped its spotlight. On Tuesday, just a few weeks after delaying shipping again and refunding pre-orders, it announced it was cancelling the device altogether.

"We recognize the market has dramatically changed, and with the product delays we have experienced, it no longer makes sense for us to move forward with our first-generation electronic reading product," Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta said in a statement. "This was a hard decision, but (it) is the best one for our company, our investors and our customers."

Plastic Logic’s representatives declined to comment on the recent rumors that it might be sold to Russian company Rusnano.

And on the Hewlett Palm front, Engadget reports hearing from trusted sources within HP that it will launch a WebOS tablet during the first quarter of 2011, and the project is codenamed “Hurricane”. As Engadget points out, this means HP is theoretically releasing tablets with three different operating systems—Windows 7, Android, and WebOS.

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 interesting to note that, like the original Enterprise’s simple pushbutton controls, the touch-sensitive design of TNG control panels and hand-held devices was born of budgetary concerns.

"We had a much lower budget than the feature films did," [Michael] Okuda told Ars. "So, for example, I looked at the production process of making a control panel, and I said, ‘How can I make this as inexpensive as possible?’ Having made those decisions, ‘now what can I do to make it as futuristic as possible?’"

The idea was that everything was a display and that the software was infinitely configurable and adaptable for ease of use. Of course, the control panels and devices in TNG didn’t really work; all the magic was added in post-production. The Okudas and Drexler expressed satisfaction and a little awe that the iPad represented the realization of that earlier vision.

In a way TNG and the iPad already share a lot of the same DNA. The graphic design for the series was done on a Macintosh, which was much easier to use than the DOS-based computers of the day.

"The very first time I saw the Apple Macintosh, it was an astonishing quantum breakthrough. Here was someone beating their brains into guacamole in order to make this machine easy for me to use," [Michael Okuda] said.

And the iPad is far from the only Trek tech to make it into the real world: flip-phones, memory cards, and USB drives all bear a lot of resemblance to things first seen “on screen”.

It’s neat to consider how ideas that were once just science fiction become reality. Of course, this isn’t as rare as one might imagine—the very ideas we like to imagine in SF become the ideas we like to design years later once the technology allows it. Star Trek is hardly alone in that respect.

For instance, just look at e-books.

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 committed to supporting Fictionwise’s platform for the iPhone, and an iPad-compatible version would also look good on iPhone 4? Did they get tired of people asking and complaining about it? As close-mouthed as B&N media relations is, we may well never know.

(And that’s not even the first time this has happened—after I was convinced that Amazon would never allow Stanza to come out with an iPad version, there it came in June! The demons must be having to contend with heavy blizzards.)

At any rate, it provides a perfect excuse for me to get around to taking a look at not only this new revision, but also at the new Barnes & Noble app at long last. Once again, there are two different applications of the same name, but pointed at different e-book stores from the same owner. How do they stack up?

Apples and Oranges

I had planned to review these two applications at the same time and compare them head to head, but looking again I realized it isn’t really possible to compare them apples-to-apples (or Apple to Apple, as the case may be) anymore. The original Barnes & Noble eReader was an exact clone of the Fictionwise app, created (as far as I know) by the same team of coders by removing a few options and reskinning it to look more like the Barnes & Noble website. In all but a few small particulars, they acted the same.

But the Barnes & Noble iPad app is something completely different. It might read Barnes & Noble e-books, but the user interface is completely new—closer to the way things are done on the Nook device itself, which suggests to me that it probably didn’t have any more to do with the original eReader or anyone who worked on it than the name.

It’s been redesigned from the ground up, and isn’t really an “eReader” app any more than the Kindle Reader is a Mobipocket app. Small wonder that the version for Android has shed the “eReader” moniker entirely, and is simply “Nook for Android”. I wouldn’t be surprised if a future revision of the B&N iPad eReader similarly renamed and rebranded it to “Nook for iPad”. (It would certainly help lessen confusion over compatibility between the two readers.)

On the other hand, the iPad version of Fictionwise’s eReader has hardly changed at all. But that may not be such a good thing.

Regardless, it’s not a simple matter of slapping a few paragraphs onto the end to say “the Barnes & Noble version is just like this except…” So I’m going to devote this review entirely to Fictionwise’s eReader, and cover Barnes & Noble’s later.

Fictionwise eReader for iPad, and the Size Change Conundrum

There was a hack I reported on a few months ago that would allow jailbroken iPads to scale up a number of iPhone apps to work in full iPad resolution without pixel doubling. It wouldn’t be the same as if they had been designed to work in that resolution—interface and design elements might be broken, or at least not look quite right—but it would use full-resolution iPad fonts and graphics.

This is fundamentally what the iPad version of eReader does to the iPhone version: simply changes it to use iPad scaling and font sizes. To be fair, this does work, to a certain extent. E-books look much better (with a few caveats that I’ll get to below) when they can be viewed in a font that is not all fuzzy and blurry from having pixels twice the size they were meant to.

The problem is that there’s more to redesigning an interface originally meant for a small screen to move it to a large screen than just doubling the size of everything.

When the iPad was in the process of being prepped for launch, tech blogs widely reported that Steve Jobs had axed a number of built-in iPhone apps from being converted over, such as the stock ticker, calculator, and clock, because Apple simply couldn’t figure out how to redesign their interfaces to look good blown up to iPad size.

We’re seeing a similar thing here. It doesn’t look like a lot of care or attention was paid to modernizing the eReader client. For all I know, it may not even have been done by the same people. (I certainly wouldn’t like to think that the people who wrote the original version were associated with this. As good as that eReader app is, I would think they’d do a more thorough job.)

Perhaps Barnes & Noble decided to go with their own in-house team rather than whatever coders Fictionwise used. Not being familiar with it, and being too lazy to bother to learn it (after all, it’s not like it’s something important, like the Nook), B&N just slapped the band-aid of resolution-change on it and sent it out into the world.

I do know that the Pendergrasts, back when they were allowed to talk to us, took considerable pride in their iPhone application, and it doesn’t seem likely they’d countenance something so slap-dash as this half-hearted adaptation if they still had any say over it. Chalk it up to another malign influence that Barnes & Noble is exercising over its once-independent subsidiary.

How Does it Look?

I’m not doing the usual “Readability/Ease of Use/Adding Content” sections with this review, because in a very real sense I’ve already done them. Go back and read my review of the iPhone eReader app. In terms of adaptation to the iPad, the screen size is the only thing that’s changed. Everything else is identical.

On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing. And as I’ve said before, it’s not really bad. Certainly as someone who started out reading e-books in eReader on a 160×160 pixel black-and-white LCD screen, this native iPad version represents a considerable improvement. I’m so glad to be able to read my eReader books in full resolution that a lot would be forgivable. But…well, let’s look at the screenshots.

On the left is the old iPhone version pixel-doubled to the iPad. On the right is the new iPad version, at the same (“Medium”) font size setting. (Click through to see in full iPad resolution.) You’ll notice that the iPad version shows a lot more text, and the text looks a lot less fuzzy, too.

But look at the user interface. It’s exactly the same. In fact, accounting for difference in screen height, I would be willing to say that the height of each status bar measures exactly the same amount of pixels. And, in fact, the icons you tap on are smaller too, because pixel for pixel they’re exactly the same icons. They haven’t been scaled up or changed at all.

Now, that pixel size worked well on the iPhone or iPod Touch, where on the smaller screen it was just the right size for tapping with your fat fingers—but on the bigger iPad screen, it’s going to be a bit harder to find in all that open space if you want to tap something quickly. (And if the higher-resolution version is likewise represented pixel for pixel when it goes to the iPhone 4, those icons are going to be almost impossible to find.)

But the lack of changes goes beyond just the interface. Here are four pictures, to prove a point. (I didn’t bother to upload the full size versions of these to Twitpic, so they won’t show up at full iPad resolution when you click on them. But there should be enough detail to get the idea.)

On the upper left is the iPhone eReader (actually the Barnes & Noble iPhone eReader, since the new version of the Fictionwise one replaced the iPhone version I kept on my iPad) at “Gigantic” font size, “Huge” margin size. On the upper right is the iPad version of eReader set to the largest font size.

Bottom left is the Barnes & Noble iPad eReader app and bottom right is the iPad Kindle Reader app set to their largest font sizes. Notice a difference there?

The “Gigantic” font size on the iPad Fictionwise eReader—the very largest font size it can display!—is smaller than the pixel-doubled version of the iPhone version’s “Medium” font shown further up the review, let alone the maximum font sizes for B&N eReader or Kindle Reader. But ou’ll notice it’s exactly the same size, pixel for pixel, as the non-doubled “Gigantic” size on the iPhone! Same with the margin widths.

I wouldn’t call the iPad font size “gigantic” or the margin “huge” by any stretch of the imagination. While they’re certainly quite readable for anyone with reasonably young eyes, someone with weaker eyes looking for a larger font size such as the B&N or Amazon apps offer is going to be out of luck. Lazy, lazy coders.

That’s the only really big annoyance. There are a couple of other complaints I’ve seen about the iPad eReader that, while annoying, aren’t really worth fussing over.

Minor Nitpicks

One is the fact that there is no two-column mode in landscape like in iBooks or the B&N eReader. While this is bothersome, especially when coupled with the narrow margins and small maximum font size, the Kindle Reader for iPad doesn’t do two-column landscape either and nobody seems upset over that.

The other nitpick has to do with the cover art, on books that have it. Yes, cover art on an eReader book is going to look lousy blown up to an iPad screen. To a certain extent, it looks pretty bad even on an iPhone screen. But that’s not the application’s fault specifically.

After all, what do you expect? The eReader (aka Peanut Reader) format hasn’t been updated in twelve years. It was originally meant for reading on 160×160 pixel monochrome LCD screens, on a device that broke files up into 64K chunks. Cover art still has a maximum size of 64K, and as seen at right is still often formatted so it looks good on a square screen (such as most Blackberries still have).

If you’re going to get upset about that, you’re about twelve years too late. It is for that reason that Fictionwise was planning to migrate to EPUB as its new eReader format…but then it got bought by Barnes & Noble, and that was that.

(The fuzzy iPhone-resolution eReader splash page on launch, though…yeah, I’ll give you that one. Lazy coders again.)

Bright Sides

Not to look a gift horse entirely in the mouth, there are still plenty of things to like about this app—many of them the same things I liked about the iPhone version, since this essentially is the iPhone version writ large (literally). The ease of downloading your entire shelf at once from either eReader or Fictionwise, for instance, or downloading books from webservers by using ereader:// URIs in Mobile Safari. You can’t do those things in the Barnes & Noble app, no matter how much more polished and iPad-optimized it might be.

And I do have a fairly large eReader-format library that I’ve built up over those last twelve years. Until this update there was simply no way to read them at full resolution on the iPad without resorting to illegal methods (well, unless we count Stanza, but Stanza doesn’t have the handy library fetch and it doesn’t quite display eReader books as well as eReader).

Lazy they might have been, but at least they came out with an iPad version at all. If they never updated it again, and this was the final version of eReader forever, I’d still be grateful for at least that much.

Ticked with Fictionwise

Of course, downloading one’s entire shelf at once does lead to another irritation with Fictionwise, albeit one that’s not entirely their fault. In the process I discovered a number of books I had already ordered—among others, several of the Rachel Vincent series of which Shift is one book, and some Dirk Pitt novels—won’t download. And since I lost my iPod Touch that previously had my library on it, I find I’m stuck without access to these books.

Furthermore, the latest books in some of the series I’ve been following—the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, the Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn—are not available on Fictionwise or eReader, presumably (like the missing books I already bought) due to the Agency Pricing situation. I already bought the latest Mercy Thompson book from Amazon when I was reviewing the Kindle Reader apps, and now I may well do the same for the new Kitty.

I had been buying everything from Fictionwise due to not wanting to keep multiple e-book libraries, but now that they’re eliminating their discount program and rebates, and Amazon is coming out with reader apps for so many different platforms, it looks as though that’s the way I’m going to end up going next.

In the end, eReader is the app you need for reading eReader books on the iPad in its full resolution, and I am very glad I’m able to do that at last. However, there is still considerable room for improvement—and with Barnes & Noble pouring most of its effort into its Nook platform, it is anybody’s guess whether that improvement can actually happen.

Paczkowski speculates that HP may be planning to concentrate on its new subsidiary Palm’s planned WebOS slate PC. HP has said it plans to expand WebOS beyond smartphones to other platforms. Perhaps they are concentrating their resources in that direction, and the Android slate will not be released at all?

Regardless, knocking the iPad off of its current pedestal is going to take some doing. Hopefully HP will be more successful than Palm was against the iPhone with its Pre.

As we see the passing of Palm, I have been following all the articles I can on the subject – after all I knew, and wrote about, most of the major Palm players before the Apple crew moved in (Ed Colligan never did get it when I told him he could give the Palm TX new life by promoting it as an ebook reader)- and the best article I’ve seen is one just published in SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle website, by Dan Frommer. His 10 reasons are, and I agree with all of them:

Palm gave Sprint too long of an exclusive
Palm never gave anyone a reason to buy the Pre instead of an iPhone, etc.
The Pre just wasn’t that good
Palm’s advertising was terrible
Palm didn’t let developers make WebOs apps until it was too late
The Pixi was a lame follow-up
Palm didn’t have the equivalent of the iPod Touch
Palm screwed up the way the Pre syncs with computers
Palm investor Bono promoted competitors
Palm’s investors made ridiculous statements that damaged its credibility

Bye, bye Palm. All gone now. I’ll remember you fondly and thanks for a number of good meals at press events.

There are stories about this all over the place. A couple of the more interesting ones: TechCrunch’s MG Siegler talks with HP VP Brian Humphries about HP’s plans for Palm.

I asked Humphries to expand a bit about webOS and how it stacks up to rival mobile OSes made by Apple and Google. I also asked why HP wouldn’t just develop its own mobile OS as Apple has done? “We think it’s one of the best operating systems out there today. We see nothing in development in the next 3 to 5 years that comes close,” Humphries said. “We want to take HP’s financial strength and use it to take webOS to the next level,” he continued.

Siegler notes that HP is also acquiring a portfolio of over 1,500 handheld technology patents—useful in the “mutual assured obstruction” strategy that is key to competing in just about any high-technology field today. Humphries suggests that HP was more interested in Palm’s webOS than its hardware—which makes sense given that HP already has some pretty decent hardware of its own.

Also, Gizmodo has some analysis of what the acquisition might mean in the long term, pointing out the possible difficulties in reconciling Palm’s innovative and HP’s more overall conservative brand strategies and the way that HP has not always done well in the handheld market so far. Also, HP is an official Microsoft Windows Phone 7 partner, which means that its approach to handheld devices might end up being a tad schizophrenic.

Still, with HP’s hardware and Palm’s OS, this might be a match made in heaven. Whether “Hewlett Palm” can actually compete with the unstoppable behemoth that is Apple right now is unclear, but I suppose they’ve got a chance if anybody does.