We lately mentioned the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle owner lending library rogram, but iPads and Kindles have another popular lending option that is also exploding. OverDrive reported that traffic to its “virtual branch” websites more than doubled last year, seeing a 130% increase. While much of that increase can be attributed to e-readers, OverDrive also saw a 22% rise in traffic from smartphones and tablets. The increase in lending might be good news for libraries, but it is unclear whether publishers will find it so. If a lent e-book displaces a sale, as some publishers seem to believe, that...

A lot of attention has been given to sub-$100 e-readers such as the new crop of Kindles. But a report from PaidContent suggests another generation of sub-$100 devices might be on the horizon: the sub-$100 smartphone. PaidContent reports that consultants at Deloitte see an impending wave of cheap smartphones hitting the market—as many as 500 million of them by the end of the year. By and large, these will not be Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian, or Windows Phone based phones, but rather they will run on closed, proprietary platforms. Most consumers care more about touchscreens or keyboards than...

A while ago, in my story about Route 66 and technology shifts, I mentioned Kodak’s failure to hop on the digital camera bandwagon quickly enough. In the last week or so, the Wall Street Journal reported Kodak is on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, mainly so that it can sell off 1,100 patents through a court-supervised auction. The Journal article suggests Kodak has been having trouble finding a suitable direction over the last couple of decades: Casting about for alternatives to its lucrative but shrinking film business, Kodak toyed with chemicals, bathroom...

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,...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

Amazon has been running a promotion with a new smartphone-based price-checking tool that lets users scan the barcodes of items in stores and compare the prices to items Amazon sells to earn 5% store store credit per item for up to three items (excluding books). Amazon has been coming in for a bit of criticism for the promotion, given that it is trying to pull even more dollars away from brick and mortar retailers at the time of year when they make the greatest amount of sales. Author Richard Russo has a fairly long opinion piece on this in...

We’ve taken websites, that we used to print out on full-sized paper, and shrunk them down to fit on handheld devices. So shouldn’t we shrink the print down, too? That seems to be the premise behind the Little Printer, a cute little device about the size of an alarm clock whose purpose is to print out information from the web onto a cash-register-receipt-sized paper strip. The device will sync with a smartphone app so that you can decide what services you want to print out, then print paper copies of to-do lists, social network notifications, news stories, and so...

TechCrunch reports that a recent Pew Internet research project survey shows that 51% of US adult cell phone users used their phones within the last month to retrieve information they needed right away. It also reports on some of the differences between usage of cell phones and smart phones, and on the percentage of users who do things like take photos, send e-mail, play games, and so forth with the devices. (And 13% of respondents admitted to faking a phone call to avoid talking to someone physically present!) It is interesting to see smart phones being used as the...

Wired is covering a survey that looks at the effect tablets have on the sales of other electronic devices. One of the major findings of the survey is that tablets are a lot more likely to replace dedicated e-readers (that is, the people surveyed said that after buying a tablet they no longer plan to buy an e-reader) than gaming devices. The survey also identified laptops as a device many new tablet owners no longer felt like buying. The number of people who feel this way for both of these devices increased from 2010 to 2011. However, the number...

An article in Knowledge @Australian School for Business discusses the fact that the present Internet addresses system, known as IPv4, will have literally used up its 4.2 billion addresses soon: APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is the registry that issues Internet addresses for the booming Asia-Pacific region, and is expected to be the first to run out. Registries in other regions may last just a few months longer. The article's writers describe the new address system, IPv6, and its 340 billion billion billion addresses, as the system that will save the Internet from the end of capacity.  It...

Smartphones are penetrating more and more widely these days, but there are still plenty of people out there with feature phones or other small-screened devices. And while there are cloud readers (such as Ibis Reader) and free e-book sites that work on smartphones and tablets, they tend to be media-intensive applications, requiring a decent amount of screen real-estate and memory. Enter ebook.Taggedzi.com, a cloud e-book site designed to work with small-screen devices that don’t have those sorts of specs—for example, basic feature phones. (Why do they call those “feature phones” when they really don’t have any?) The site acts...

Oregon school kids really seem to like iPod Touches (or should that be “iPods Touch”?). Two different, unrelated projects have come to light over the last few months using them to boost kids’ reading abilities. In the Canby School District, every third and fourth grade student has been issued an iPod Touch, which they use for reading and math exercises. Reports are that they do so quite well, too: In presentations, [district technology coordinator Joseph] Morelock has shown that several classrooms using the iPod touches generated better test scores than the district average. He...