Prognostication. It’s a favorite hobby of the e-book-loving crowd, perhaps because the same love of technology that lets us enjoy reading on hand-held gizmos extends to other devices, too. And some prognostications are more serious than others. One at least partly tongue-in-cheek set comes from Nick Abadzis, via Tor.com. Abadzis throws out some ideas for what might happen in publishing in the near, farther, and more distant future. I’m not entirely sure how serious he’s being, but he has some interesting ideas. In the near future, he predicts a new iPad magazine format of short pieces designed...

Tor.com has a couple of e-reading-related posts up today, as it nears its two-year anniversary on July 20th. First, Tor.com is joining the throng of other websites and news sources that are developing apps for the iPad, and has posted a call for iPad developers. If you would like to try out, email them your résumé. Hopefully Tor will remember that their app experience has to beat not other blogs’ or magazines’ experience, but the experience of browsing their blog via the web. Commenters are questioning the decision given that the iPad’s web browser is quite...

Unlike Stephenie Meyer, Tor.com knows how to give away free e-books for real. The site gave a bunch away as part of its launch promotion, and now it’s doing it again (albeit on a much smaller scale). Four stories that premiered on Tor.com and are now eligible for Hugo, Nebula, or Locus awards are now available for free download via the US iBooks (no direct link available, but it’s showing up as “Award-Nominated Sci-Fi Short Stories” in the rotating ads at the top of the iBooks store right now), Kindle, and Sony Reader stores. They will remain...

K. Tempest Bradford at Tor.com has posted a brief rundown of 8 different e-book readers, ranging from his favorite (the Spring Design Alex) down to his least favorite (the iRex DR800SG). There’s not a lot to argue with, as it’s mostly his opinions, but it’s interesting to see what other people think. Meanwhile, Engadget has an in-depth look at the Spring Design Alex. On the whole, they found it enjoyable to use (with just a few minor caveats), but note that commercial e-books and an app store will not be available until the summer, and the $399 price...

Previously we mentioned that  Simon Owens at Bloggasm reported that two BYU academics have looked at the sales of 41 print books for 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after after they were released as free e-books. (You can read their results here.) They found that there is a “moderate correlation” between the release of free e-books and a growth in the sale of the print version in most cases. Interestingly, one of the cases where there was not a correlation—and sales actually went down—was in the case of the free e-books Tor.com offered temporarily to promote the new blog,...

TechCrunch’s M.G. Siegler reports that another “winner” in the Amazon vs. Macmillan feud is Barnes & Noble, who is getting a lot of new purchase traffic for books Amazon is currently unwilling to carry. I would add, from the time I have spent reading various discussion forums about it, that a good many of the people who comment in discussion threads at Scalzi’s Whatever, Charlie Stross’s blog, and Making Light have said they are shifting all their purchases over to Barnes & Noble—and some have said they are going ahead and buying Nooks, too. Furthermore, the SFWA...

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...