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 means that many more people won’t actually buy their books or e-books. (This is undoubtedly why HarperCollins put a 26-checkout limit on its e-books and Penguin has ceased providing any to libraries at all.)

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 what OS the device is running.

These phones will not likely have 3G, but could have other useful features:

WiFi is likely to become a “standard” feature of these devices, as will email, instant messaging, a pared-down form of apps and a camera—a list of services, that, along with the touchscreens, seem to now be the smartphone bare essentials. As prices for components continue to drop, specifications for these sub-$100 phones will continue to get better (or smarter, as the case may be).

It’s not clear, of course, whether any of these phones will have the ability to read e-books. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon or other major e-book companies reached out to cut deals with carriers to get their readers included on that “pared-down” list of apps. A smartphone is a digital device you’ll probably keep with you at all times, and if you can read e-books on it, chances are at least some of you will.

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 cleaners and medical-testing devices in the 1980s and 1990s, before deciding to focus on consumer and commercial printers in the past half-decade under Chief Executive Antonio Perez.

The Australian blog The Conversation suggests that Kodak’s problem is not, as some (such as the Techdirt article I quoted in my Route 66 post) would have it, a failure to embrace digital quickly enough, or the rise of “good enough” phone cameras displacing the need for a separate point-and-shoot. (In fact, phone cameras took only about 6% of all photos shared on Flickr.) The actual problem cuts deeper than that, and has to do with a failure in Kodak’s mindset—it’s not about what people take pictures with, it’s about what they do with them afterward.

Kodak’s fundamental problem, the blog suggests, is that it was still fixated on people printing photos after they take them. Back in the days of film, people took photos to remember things. (Given how expensive and slow to develop film was, it’s not surprising that it would have been reserved for important things like that.) But the purpose of personal photography has changed with digital—it’s no longer about making memories, but about communication and personal identity.

We (especially young people) now take photos on the spur of the moment, upload them to Facebook or Flickr, and add comments on them that show what we’re doing or thinking about. We can take them for the most trivial of reasons, such as the snapshot I took the other day of a package of chocolate-coated “dried plum” bites. I took it so I could share it on Facebook with a note about how hilarious I found it that the word “prune” didn’t appear anywhere on the package. I have no desire at all to print it out, and there’s no way I would ever have taken a photo like that back in the days of film.

But just when all this was happening, as quoted above, for the last five years Kodak has been focusing on “consumer and commercial printers.” Meanwhile, companies like Nikon and Canon who have a better grounding in hardware and technology have been eating Kodak’s lunch.

Assuming Kodak’s Chapter 11 reorganization succeeds, of course, the company will still be with us. But it’s doubtful it will be more than a niche player in the new world of digital photography—its competitors are just too far ahead. The time seems to have passed when Kodak could expect a “photo finish.”

Perhaps this also has some implications for books. Kodak was hung up on the old form factor and uses of photos: you take a picture, you want to print it out. Now granted, people have almost never wanted to print e-books out, but most publishers and e-tailers have been treating them as essentially exactly the same thing as paper books just in a different form factor. But the front runners, such as Amazon, seem to have focused instead on how to make e-books and e-readers indispensible to people’s lives in ways paper books haven’t been.

(Found via Slashdot.)

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, is resounding evidence of the looming death of dedicated readers. The Fire is sharing the Kindle name not only because it helps in marketing a new product, but because the concepts are on an inevitable path toward merging. The e-ink Kindle is limited, but with the converging technology in displays, its brand and legacy will live on in an entirely different form. The e-ink Kindle and Nook will fall into a niche category, while tablets (or similar) will continue to thrive.

The craze for the fire-sale TouchPads, Alexander suggests, shows that consumers are only putting up with e-readers but what they really want are tablets. (I know that my uncle, who prior to last Christmas was quite pleased with his 3G Kindle Keyboard, is now looking to sell it and buy a Kindle Fire like the one he got for his wife and then fell in love with himself.) E-readers are just a “stopgap” to tide people over until tablets get good enough, and it looks like they’ll be there before long.

This reminds me of what happened to PDAs. They used to be the mobile computing device. but they gradually vanished as smartphones took over everything they could do and added communication capability too. Now phoneless PDA devices like the iPod Touch and the Galaxy Player are very much the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps that future is coming for e-readers, too, if tablets can get good enough and inexpensive enough to take over the niche.

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 next ten years, to real “Google goggles”, or otherwise computerized glasses, that use the smartphone as their processing hub. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to read e-books, having the text floating in front of your eyes?

But Kevin Fogarty on the IT World blog says not so fast, pointing out that the New York Times obtained this information from anonymous and unidentified sources. Without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to gauge such sources’ reliability—or their motives for revealing what they do.

No matter how convenient, cool and wearable our computers become, they’ll still only be a conduit for the information we get through them.

If more and more of that information comes from "people" hiding their identities and touting products they hope they’ll eventually be able to produce and sell, we might be better off sticking with the old, clunky technology we have to stick in a pocket instead.

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 the New York Times in which he takes aim at Amazon’s promotion as being aimed expressly at stealing money from bookstores. (As far as I know, it’s actually aimed at brick and mortar stores in general, including Walmart, Best Buy, and so on.)

At least some of the people Russo talked to about it seemed to recognize this fact, and couched their response in those general terms:

[Authors Guild president] Scott [Turow] supplied lawyerly perspective: “The law has long been clear that stores do not invite the public in for all purposes. A retailer is not expected to serve as a warming station for the homeless or a site for band practice. So it’s worth wondering whether it’s lawful for Amazon to encourage people to enter a store for the purpose of gathering pricing information for Amazon and buying from the Internet giant, rather than the retailer. Lawful or not, it’s an example of Amazon’s bare-knuckles approach.”

But others seemed to take this as yet another example of Amazon’s war on the bookstore, and decried Amazon taking advantage of their investment of money and effort by treating their bookstore as a showroom for web-order goods.

Something that I find amusing about the whole thing is that everyone seems to be acting as if Amazon invented the idea of smartphone comparison shopping. But smartphone apps and other pricematch services have been around for several years now. (Here’s a piece about one such app, Mobiletag, from last year, and one about cell phone comparison shopping from 2009.)

I used to use Frucall, which launched all the way back in 2006 (it apparently went under sometime within the last couple of years), to save me a lot of money on my shopping with my non-smartphone. The way it went was that I would text the UPC number of an item to Frucall, Frucall would tell me I could get it more cheaply online, so I would forego buying it at the store…and then by the time I got home to where I could buy it online, I would inevitably have forgotten that I even wanted it to begin with. (See? Money saved!)

Perhaps the difference is that the other services were just services to find prices at other stores, rather than one launched by an on-line store itself. But I still remember reading in years past an article that stated some retailers were outright trying to prevent people from using smartphones to comparison shop in their locations—so it’s not as if it’s a new worry for them.

When you get right down to it, Amazon’s price-matching app is really just a symptom of the larger trend toward doing more shopping online rather than in person, especially at this busy time of year. I know my parents are delighted that they can do most of their shopping via Amazon and not have to venture out amid the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping. And perhaps the retailers should actually be glad those people are even venturing out to where they might buy something from them. It at least shows that they’re in the market for physical goods, rather than staying at home and buying e-books.

Honestly, who enjoys dealing with holiday crowds and traffic? People had put up with it until the last few years because it was the only game in town. But when you offer someone an alternative, it’s not surprising that they’re going to take it. Perhaps these retailers should try to figure out a way to make themselves more attractive to consumers who at least bother to comparison-shop in them, so that they’ll be willing to buy it in person even if they can get a better price online. They at least have the chance to interact with those people; they may never meet the ones who do all their shopping from their keyboards at all.

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 on. It’s the first element of a household appliance cloud system from its manufacturer, Berg, and should soon integrate with other home electronics.

It’s kind of the opposite of the “paperless office”—indeed, it seems to hark back to the days when strips of paper bearing stock symbols emerged from under little glass domes—but it might very well catch on with people who would like to have the tactile experience of interacting with their electronic lives on paper.

It is interesting to see smart phones being used as the primary in-a-hurry information appliances of choice of a number of people. But one of the questions sadly lacking from the survey, which I would like to have seen compared to all the other statistics, is how many people read e-books with them.

However, the number of new tablet-owners who said they would not buy portable gaming devices, mp3 players, gaming consoles, and smartphones whas declined from 2010 to 2011. It’s not clear whether this decline is explained only by the numbers for laptops and e-readers rising.

Of course, the survey doesn’t take into account those people who don’t want a tablet but do want an e-reader—but still, signs suggest something might happen similar to the way the smartphone killed off the phoneless PDA ten years ago. Sooner or later, all our hand-held media devices might become multifunctional.

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 recommends that companies start developing their IPv6 systems before it’s too late to add to IPv4.  It does, however, caution that the IPv6 system will be incompatible with the IPv4 system, creating–what else?–two IP systems running concurrently, and forcing businesses and consumers to straddle the worlds of both IP systems, new and old, at least for a good while.  You thought the Browser wars were a pain.

Actually, browser users probably won’t have to worry: Most ISPs are either planning on rolling out IPv6, or have already experimented with it.  ISP customers may see no difference whatsoever with their web access.  But if you produce a web site, you might want to see what your ISP or IT staff is doing about IPv6, and whether you’ll need to take any steps on your site to accommodate it.

And how does this affect ebooks, you ask?  Well, since every item that connects to the Internet needs its own IP address–including your ebook reading device or cellphone–the switch to the IPv6 system is supposed to allow for unprecedented communications between your many devices and the Internet, including some connections you may not have thought of… but clearly somebody did.

In Japan, for instance, some of the taxis have IPv6 addresses in their windscreen wipers. When taxies turn on their wipers, the cab company knows and can send lots of cabs to the area because it’s raining. “There are so many opportunities for other sorts of business and what you can do in terms of communication,” says (executive director of the Internet Society of Australia, Holly) Raiche.

The suggestion here is that ebook reading devices and cellphones, for example, may be able to contact a book outlet when it knows you’ve finished a book, or looked up an author or phrase, in order to sell you a new book.  Doesn’t sound too bad.  But it also suggests that device might be able to contact the outlet (or… bum bum bummm… someone else) if you copy that ebook and give it to someone else, or post it online.  Hey, at least that would solve the DRM problem…

Of course, these same organizations are talking about using those 340 billion billion billion IP addresses and giving them to every item on a store shelf, every electronic device in your home (even light bulbs and cables), every public piece of infrastructure, adding them to every device on your desk (“Attention: You are out of staples.  I have ordered a box for you.”), etc, etc.  If they do that, how long before we need an IPv8 system and another few billion billion billion billion billion billion addresses?

Bottom line, we should expect ground-breaking changes in our electronic devices… at some point.  Maybe soon.  Maybe not.  Bookmark this spot.

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 as a cloud reader for free public-domain e-books, with over 600 currently available for on-line reading in small chunks encoded in basic xhtml. (Though Project Gutenberg also offers a public domain e-book site for mobiles that features just a few more titles.)

As the picture at left shows, it’s at least marginally readable on a cell phone. I’m not sure I’d care to read a whole e-book that way (particularly since web browsing sucks down my prepaid minutes), though.

Still, cell phones have a long history of use for a variety of web-based tasks in places where nothing else is available, such as parts of Africa. And it also works for other small web-enabled devices like Nintendo DS handhelds. (I tried accessing it on my iPod Touch but the text was all but microscopic since Mobile Safari was treating it like a full-sized web page. Not sure how to change that.)

Of course selection is limited to the public domain titles posted on the site. I wonder if the Ibis Reader folks could be persuaded to come up with a way-stripped-down version of their upload-your-own cloud reader based around the same no-frills, tiny-chunks philosophy?

(Found via Daemon’s Books.)

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 looks at iPod touches and other mobile learning devices as unparalleled tools that can be used in nearly every class.

Kids love the devices (as naturally kids do), but more than that, they allow the kids to go back and repeat exercises they had trouble with without public embarrassment. They’ve also taken to researching material from books on-line. Other schools are starting to take notice.

Meanwhile, in the Eugene School District, sixth-grade teacher Marilyn Williams is using iPod Touches to help her students with reading comprehension and retention, teaching from a sixth grade reader that comes with audio CDs. She used GarageBand to import and edit the audio CD content to add additional material with reading comprehension strategies. Then she added the text into the lyrics section in iTunes, so that they would display for students to read along with the audio.

She said that she used the iPod Touch for a number of reasons including that they’re smaller and more mobile than laptops, are more personal and individualized, and are “cool” or socially acceptable.

However, Williams also said, "You could certainly use any digital device that allowed you to display text with speech. Since I completed the research, the text to speech capabilities of these devices has improved a lot, and, if I were starting the project now, I might use a different tool. However, using iTunes and GarageBand was, and is, a pretty simple, seamless way to deliver the content and instruction."

Williams goes into more detail about the program in a dissertation that is hosted online at the University of Oregon Library.

(This is not the first time Eugene, Oregon has been mentioned on TeleRead. Back in 2004, David Rothman quoted an article about a Eugene cyberschool that was creating its own electronic courseware.)

In November, 2010, I pointed out some articles suggesting ways schools could make educational use of smartphones, which the iPod Touch very nearly is. In January, The Guardian carried a similar report. It’s interesting to see two different schools in Oregon leading the way in doing something similar.

As with Best Buy’s Kindle sales, the AT&T-sold Kindle will cost the same $189 retail price as the version you get via Amazon. The fact that Amazon is widening its retail presence, and thus losing a chunk of cash to middlemen from even more sales, could suggest that the price is coming down enough that perhaps Amazon might be inclined to go even further later this year, using discounted or free Kindles to entice more people to sign up for Amazon Prime.

Or I could be reaching. We’ll just have to see.

Some of which involve e-books.

The article doesn’t say much about student use of cell phones, which could have even greater implications for education and information access—assuming schools can come up with ways to encourage desirable uses while preventing undesirable ones.