Is the e-reader doomed? According to Matt Alexander on The Loop, it might just be on its way out as tablets get better and better. Alexander’s argument basically boils down to the fact that e-ink is an intermediate step, a necessary compromise between readability and display quality. E-ink is evolving toward being able to present color and full motion video, he suggests—and when you have an e-reader that can do that, it won’t be an e-reader anymore, but rather a tablet. And really, the naming of these devices, the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet/Color,...

From the press release: Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755) and Kobo Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Rakuten intends to acquire 100% of total issued and outstanding shares of Kobo for US$315 million in cash. Kobo was founded by and spun out of Indigo, the largest book, gift and specialty toy retailer in Canada, in December, 2009. Since that time, Kobo...

OK, the headline is a bit over the top but still worth a mention. From the LA Times: Will this symbolize the death knell of the paper book? Furniture giant IKEA will debut a new version of its classic BILLY bookcase that is intended to store everything except well-thumbed reading material, a report says. Coming out next month, the tweaked bookcase will feature deeper shelves meant to display “ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, this is, except books,” the Economist reported. Here’s the Full Text of The Economist Story: “Great Digital Expectations” It Includes: Publishers are increasingly trying to push books...

here has been considerable discussion lately about authors and publishers selling their ebooks directly to readers, much of it fueled by J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore announcement. The approach is technically feasible as well as financially lucrative. Why give stores like Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble (etc.) a cut if you don’t have to? As an avid reader of ebooks I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means for me. The key reader benefit touted so far is that the ebooks (Harry Potter ebooks at least) will be free of copy protection. I’ll agree that is attractive to some people but in...

From The Oregonian: Starting today, local readers will have access to 23,000 more e-books as the library introduces a new streaming e-book collection. With a library card and a pin number the e-books can read online from any computer and they don’t expire because the books aren’t downloaded but streamed. There’s no software to download and multiple users can read the same books at the same time. The non-fiction e-books include everything from career development to cookbooks and are provide through an electronic collection called “Public Library Complete” by ebrary. The collection includes 3,000 Spanish-language titles as...

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...

Mark Coker of Smashwords alerted me to this scam. Keep your eyes open. From Smashwords: This disturbs me to no end. A Smashwords author found their book mentioned on this site - http://best1ebooks.com/ - and wrote us to ask if we're distributing to them. Definitely not. They appear to be scraping Smashwords book covers and book descriptions and then selling [who knows what, but definitely not our books] at marked up prices. The site is designed to trick customers. It features false logos to make it look like the shopping experience is a safe...

Amazon wants feedback on an "early preview of the next software update" for Kindle 3 and refers to this update-preview as software update version 3.01. They stress this is offered so that "Customers who want to try this early release of the software and provide feedback can download the update from their servers." Amazon explains that this update will add ' the ability to create a new Amazon.com account directly from your Kindle, as well as additional performance improvements. After installing this update, please share your feedback with us at kindle-response@amazon.com.  We look forward to hearing about...

Kobo showed its new ereader in Las Vegas yesterday. The reader will be available at Indigo Books & Music in Canada, followed by Borders starting this summer. The reader is the cheapest one to have a full bookstore behind it. The unit will have a 6" screen and no 3G other wireless connection. Books will have to be transferred through the PC and it can read Epub and uses Adobe Digital Editions. According to a press release I received just now, Kobo is also launching a "Kobo eReader application [that] marks a first in this emerging market...

Fifteen years ago, the device that singlehandedly created the PDA market, and also probably did the most to start the e-book ball rolling, was the humble Palm Pilot. It was truly a marvel for its time—which is why it is so sad to see Palm floundering today, an also-ran in the smartphone market behind Apple and Android-powered devices. Palm’s stock prices hit a 52-week low on Friday after a lackluster earnings announcement, and analysts have downgraded their opinion of the stock to “sell”—with two analysts even lowering their price target to $0 (meaning that they think Palm’s stock prices will...

What piece of technology most makes you feel like you’re “living in the future”? Laptop Magazine asked a number of speculative-fiction writers that question, including Jeffrey A. Carver, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and Tobias Buckell. Interestingly, most of them responded the iPhone (or in Scalzi’s case, the iPod Touch). Jeffrey Carver said, after the Star Trek-inspired nature of his flip-to-open cellphone: My second thought was eBook reader. I love reading on my Sony Reader and also on my Dell PDA, which I keep almost for the sole purpose of using as...

I ran across a post in the baen.EBookReader forum of Baen’s Bar from someone who said he got “format bait-and-switched” by Barnes and Noble. He said he ordered the e-book of D. D. Barant’s Dying Bites expecting to get the eReader format, which is what they had last time he shopped there. Instead, he  got an ePub—which didn’t do him any good because he reads e-books on his Palm. Curious, I went to Barnes & Noble to check for myself. I loaded up the page and cast myself in the role of the average consumer who knows...