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A blender that makes smoothies based on fruits trending on Twitter. I think things like this could help publishers think outside the box.Similar to authors who write chapter by chapter and then based on reader comments, continue and develop the story. Digital influence in realtime.

Comment on Nicholas Carr's new book "The Shallows" and argument that technology multi-tasking is dangerously affecting our ability for deep, reflective reading.

Something pretty sad about this trend.  The comments section make for an interesting read - a lot energy released here.

Critic and essayist Sven Birkerts comments on what we lose in the page-to-screen transfer

The comments make this worth posting.

Bookswim aims to be Netflix for books. Comments on this article from book authors are worth reading.

Chaos (and cursing!) in the magazine distribution arena. The comments at the end are interesting, too.

How do you keep a print book relevant in a rapidly changing technology domain?  Continuous publishing is one possibility, supported in O'Reilly Press' Live Editions.   See the comments for some interesting discussion with the authors of the first Live Edition book.

Comment on the iPad from Tim O'Reilly, David Gelernter and others. Over 250,000 e-books downloaded on the first weeken!

PayPal comments on Apple's pricing plans for iPad books.

From the Pan Macmillan blog earlier this year. Please see the reader comments and the follow up post.

Update: Though it still seems like a strong possibility that publisher demands are behind this, several commenters and other sources have pointed out that it's just as likely to have been Amazon's decision. We mistakenly stated that Amazon implied they were acting at the publishers' behest, but that was a misreading of the quote from Findings and has been corrected.

This brings up the double-edged sword: you can correct actual factual errors in real time, which is wonderful, but this also could make life rather difficult for people who cite those (erroneous) facts unintentionally and use them to further research, policymaking, etc. as they wouldn't be able to go back and say "I got my information here" because the information wouldn't be there anymore. (Or, as someone in the comments section brought up, facts can be more easily changed subject to political necessity.)

"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? "The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" - Edward Whitacre, Jr., CEO of the telephone company SBC (commenting on Google in 2005)

Powerful criticism of GBS and its mishandling of metadata.

Of course we talked about this in class, but what I find more interesting than Oprah's endorsement is all the comments at the end of the article. Several posters don't even acknowledge Oprah's new-found interest, but are just extolling Kindle's virtues. My guess is that, until the Kindle's price is a little lower, those folks who just like to get what Oprah has might not go for it. But the more "techie" folks might get one -- or already have one -- regardless of what Oprah thinks.