The Borders post-mortems continue. Here’s a couple more of them that are particularly worthy of note. First, on Quora, another Borders ex-exec sets down his thoughts. Mark Evans, former Director of Merchandise Planning & Analysis, has a six-point analysis of why the store failed. Though he goes into detail for each one, his list comes down to the following reasons: Failure to adequately address the Internet sales channel and the subsequent e-book market. Poor real estate strategy. Over-investment in music. Over-reliance on assortment size to compete...

On TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld takes a look at the problems magazines have been having adapting to the iPad—in short, they are over-bloated, under-featured, and cost too much—and suggests a blueprint for magazines and newspapers to follow to take full advantage of what the iPad has to offer. Even though most iPad magazines are frankly lousy from a standpoint of usability, Schonfeld points out, they’re still doing major advertising business because “advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new.” It is, he says, considerably more advertising dollars than readers that are driving iPad magazine apps right now. ...

TechCrunch has a three-minute video demo from a startup called Rethink Books who is looking to build a social network interface around e-books. From the video, this seems to revolve around integrating Twitter into an e-reader app and then using tweets as shared annotations linked to particular parts of a given e-book. The Kindle already allows some integrated social network sharing, but does not seem to go as fully into the networking aspect as Rethink’s application. Certainly, social networking is one of the major drivers of Internet use nowadays, especially on mobile devices—and lack of it has been...

Alexia Tsotsis has a post at TechCrunch pointing out that the phone call is “dead” (in the sense in which the term is used in the tech industry these days—meaning “on the decline”). The article itself is interesting enough, though it says much the same things as a piece I covered here already. But it seems to me that the “decline” or, perhaps, transmutation of the mobile industry might have some implications for “telereading”, too. E-books are just one aspect of telereading, after all. Other aspects include magazines, newspapers, blogs, and other textual Internet sources—and getting those in a...

In one of the BMW promotional films starring Clive Owen, after some fancy driving Owen glances over his shoulder at his passenger and bemusedly asks, “You still alive?” That was about my feeling on noticing a Gizmodo report stating that Fusion Garage, renowned for its spectacular breakup with TechCrunch practically on the eve of the launch of the “Crunchpad" (subsequently renamed the JooJoo), is going to come out with a new model of JooJoo tablet next year. It was surprising to find they’re still alive in the face of a lawsuit from TechCrunch, overall poor reviews, and...

John Biggs at TechCrunch has an amusing look at PaperBecause.com, a website by paper manufacturer Domtar about how awesome paper is. The site itself is pretty funny in its heavy-handed fulsome paper praise. Because, after all, “Underneath all our wireless, streaming, hands-free technology, we’re still people.” The site declares: Domtar is committed to the responsible use of paper. We're also committed to communicating paper's place and value to the businesses and people that use our products every day. Paper is a sustainable, renewable, recyclable, plant-based product that connects us in so many ways to the...

Is (news)print dying? It’s an interesting question, and the answer seems to depend on who you believe. On The Guardian, former editor Peter Preston writes that perhaps newspapers don’t have that much to fear from the Internet after all. But "in the UK at least, there is no such correlation", reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. "This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well...

The iPad is certainly becoming popular in education. One of the latest schools to experiment with iPads as a teaching tool is the Stanford University School of Medicine, which will be looking at using iPads to lighten the textbook load on students, Mediabistro’s GalleyCat reports. Given that medical students have to study anatomy, the iPad’s color screen with its easy ability to zoom at a touch could prove very useful for examining pictures and diagrams. (We previously covered another Stanford institution, the Stanford Engineering Library, getting rid of many of its paper books in favor of electronic equivalents.)...

Speaking of tablets, anyone remember the JooJoo nee CrunchPad? It got a software update last week, and when I saw the story on Engadget a few days ago I actually had to cudgel my brain before I remembered what it was. But that’s actually not the most interesting news to hit about the device lately. Last night, the ruling came out on the lawsuit that Mike Arrington filed against Fusion Garage for allegedly stealing the tablet right out from under them. The ruling itself can be found on Scribd, but an interesting analysis can be found at Hank...

iPad, iPad, iPad. TeleRead readers can be excused for thinking that we perhaps focus on the iPad a little too much these days—but on the other hand, when it comes to a large-screen color e-book reading experience, there’s the iPad, and then there’s…well, what is there? A few months ago, TechCrunch’s CrunchGear section listed 14 possible alternatives to the iPad that were then under production. Writer Matt Burns has now gone back to ask “Where are they now?” Of the 14, only 7 have made it to release, and most of those proved to be subpar...

TechCrunch has a piece about an app-zine billing itself as “the first iPad-only magazine.” Sideways, $3.99 in the app store, is a magazine created for the iPad, about the iPad. While the feature stories in the current issue don’t interest me enough to want to pay $4 for it, the magazine seems to be getting some good reviews, both by TechCrunch and on the app store page. Writes app reviewer “stephthepanda”: Sideways has it right. Think about the capabilities of the iPad first, THEN focus on the content. These articles really pop because of...

In light of the web browser vs. apps articles I mentioned the other day, it is interesting to note TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld’s coverage of Sports Illustrated’s demonstration of a new, HTML5 version of its magazine at Google’s I/O conference yesterday. The e-zine, Schonfeld noted, was much like SI’s tablet prototype from a few months ago—except that instead of being an app, it was entirely within the browser, using HTML5 features to generate more app-like functions, such as a pop-up navigation wheel. These prototypes point to a more Web-friendly future for magazines, where they can...