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...

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 Gizmodo, Jamie Condliffe has a report on a 74-slide presentation by Andrew Rushbass, CEO of The Economist Group. The Economist is one of few newspapers that has successfully implemented a paywall, and in the presentation Rushbass talks about how and why the company was able to do it. What’s more, Rushbass explains that tablet owners are reading more news than before, but reading it in different ways. He calls this the “Lean Back 2.0” paradigm (following the first “Lean Back,” which was paper books, then “Lean Forward”, which was the World Wide Web), and suggests that e-readers...

On the Daggle blog, Danny Sullivan asks the question, “Why do Amazon & Apple hate families?” He points out that a number of the products services the companies offer are not exactly family-friendly—not in terms of inappropriate content, but because they make it harder for families to share devices. For example, lots of children like to play games on their parents’ iPhones or iPads—but since those children can’t have iTunes accounts of their own (due to child-protection laws that place limits on what information Internet sites can collect from children under the age of 13), that leads to...

CNET has a 3-minute video that bills itself as a “Buyer’s Guide” for tablets and e-readers, though it primarily focuses on tablets, and mostly the more expensive tablets—the iPad, the Galaxy S, and Sony’s Android tablet (which I hadn’t heard of before). It paints this trio of $499 tablets as the main attraction for buyers this holiday season, then spends a little time discussing the Amazon Kindle and Kindle Fire as alternatives. In the video, CNET’s Donald Bell refers to the Kindle Fire as a “good enough product”—essentially a device that will work well as an e-reader and...

HP's flagship tablet, the Touchpad, launched just a month ago in 16GB and 32GB models for $500 and $600 respectively, but in an attempt to move more units the company has introduced a $100 discount to both models. The new $400/500 prices are now showing up on sites like Amazon and BestBuy.com, but if you want a slightly better deal you should check out today's offer from Amazon-owned Woot.com: $380 + $5 shipping. Here's another review of the device if you want a second opinion....

AOL has just launched a new iPad app, Editions, which serves up a custom daily "magazine" of content from both its own sites and others (but mostly its own). Like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu, Hitpad and a slew of other apps, you can customize the type of content you see, although if you don't like the default suggestions you'll have to connect your social network accounts to it to generate new topics. Editions seems to fall somewhere between Flipboard and The Daily, borrowing a lot of the visual style of the former but packaging itself as a once-a-day digital publication...

Inkling, which develops digital textbooks for the iPad, has been around for a couple of years now, but this year its been steadily building up steam (or at least cash) as it prepares to dramatically expand its offerings this fall. Earlier this year it secured funding from Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and today it announced a second round of funding from several investors. Inkling's approach is to augment textbooks with interactive, social, and annotation features, then sell them by the chapter for $3 each. The approach may or may not be cheaper--CEO Matt MacInnis says it can end up costing a...

Mashable's Lauren Indvik recently shadowed the men and women behind Sports Illustrated and published a case study of their workflow. There are some interesting lessons here for other publishers who are developing a digital strategy. Indvik writes: ...web and print are divided mainly by article length: the web is for shorter, newsier hits and print is a repository for long-form journalism. Quality is consistent largely because most of Sports Illustrated‘s staff touch every extension of the brand. Nearly all the writers (95%) produce content for both the web and print, filing short news pieces for the web while building out longer,...

E-reading isn’t just for books and newspapers. ReadWriteWeb and Gizmodo report that the Obama administration is offering to pay up to $44,000 as Medicare incentives or up to $63,750 as Medicaid incentives to any doctor who starts using drchrono, an electronic medical records app that has been certified for “meaningful use” by the Department of Health & Human Services. The app began as a simple appointment reminder system for patients, but it has iterated steadily. It recently added support for billing through insurance providers, media integration for medical charts, speech-to-text transcription, and support for electronic...

Rich Adin at An American Editor says he won't buy a tablet in the near future, partly because of the walled garden approach enforced by Apple, and partly for utilitarian reasons: My “no” came about for various reasons, not least of which is that I really dislike Steve Jobs telling me what compromises I have to make. For me, the lure of the PC/Microsoft world has always been that, with the exception of the operating system, I have choices — and lots of them. [...] I do know someone who bought a tablet and loves it. But when I asked him...

German ebook software company txtr has updated its Android app with several new features. Some, such as bookmark and note syncing, are familiar to users of the Kindle app, but the update surpasses Amazon's offering by including cloud storage for personal docs as well as purchased books. The company also offers a white label version that can be customised or branded by third parties, and claims to have the largest selection of German language titles in the German market. From the press release: Besides searching for books and browsing by genre, users can now discover books through channels, such as Featured Books...