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Features for the SimpleTouch by Nook. Competition for Amazon Touch coming out.

The company had hoped to have the e-book reader available in its highest-volume stores this week, but online demand is outstripping supply. "> <!-- script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://i.cmpnet.com/informationweek/js/tab.js">&lt;/script --> <!-- <script src='http://i.cmpnet.com/ads/graphics/as5/redirect/tw_mcafee_081021.js'>&lt;/script> --> http://www.informationweek.com/rss/all_st

Kindle for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can now display embedded video and audio clips for Kindle e-books, courtesy of the latest upgrade to the app. Read this blog post by Lance Whitney on Digital Media.

"Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments' feathers with a "surveillance-proof" smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further-with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it's just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it-sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds." In an age where we can pretty much assume we're being monitored 24/7, is this a good thing? Or is this another tool for some really terrible people to do some really terrible things, but now with an added layer of privacy?

The Internet retailer has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up, according to a person briefed on the deal.

Kindle-killers? A flood of e-readers on the way, some featuring touch and even video chat

Since this was a topic of discussion in last class and we didn't touch on this point....the future of libraries involves sharing their special collections digitally

books on your iPhone or Touch. And you know what? It works great!

Questia Library Plus iPhone app. Credit: Questia We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone. Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99. There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start. For one, students don't like to buy things....

The SAGE Connection blog has a lot of useful info on publishing and associations. This one touches on social media and using QR codes.

Read a free sample or buy Eat Nourish and Grow by Cheryl Barnhart. You can read this book with iBooks on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac.

Is the KindleFire really that great? Has anyone used one yet?

I haven't played with the Fire yet, but I'm always very dubious of the "tech analyst". Let's face it, dominating the Android tablet market isn't all that difficult right now, as there is a dearth of poorly built, poorly performing Android tablets on the market today. My own personal opinion is that the OS offers a lot of promise, but ironically the real value of the Fire is its connection to Amazon's own "walled garden" of products and services, which flys directly in the face of Android's selling characteristic of "openness".

Randomly, my friend won a Kindle Fire at an office holiday function and I got to play around with it last night. Here are my impressions: First, it's very simple to use though it has that same noticeable lag that all Android tablets seem to have, though I will say not as pronounced as others. It has a rubber-like backing in the same style that the NOOK Simple Touch employs, so it feels good in your hands and won't slide around. Here's one thing that I was surprised about; it's a bit of a brick, meaning it's a lot heavier than I expected. For an eReader, weight seems like a big deal, so I would definitely take one for a test-spin before buying if you can, especially if you're going to use it for long reads. My friend only had one copy of a book, and I thumbed through pretty quickly, and the Fire seemed to handle it well. It had a lot less lag page turning than it did starting apps. On the web, the Fire did pretty well, it downloaded and ran pages smoothly for the most part. Though I will say I went to one of my favorite sites (arsenal.com) to watch some video highlights of yesterday's game, and even though it has a 7 inch screen, the video "wasn't optimized" for the Fire, so the playback size was smaller than it would have been on my iPhone (postage stamp size). On ESPN.com though it seemed to handle video there much better. My other complaint was that the Fire didn't seem to recognize page widths very well, so you have to do a lot of pinching to get the right view of a page in portrait view. So, I'll put down my pocket-protector, ease off the dork-pedal a bit, and just say for the price it's a solid tablet that runs pretty well.

Bookstore revival? Let's hope so. Perhaps some people like the personal touch after all.

The Power of the Link

I think the writer touches on two things that are very important for Internet readers: they want to see something else and they want to see what's next. Yahoo, Drudge, Google -- these sites update regularly, and they update frequently. Readers/users who visit these sites are looking for something new, something close to whatever they were previously reading, and they are looking for it to come to them quickly.