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EReaders are becoming increasingly popular, but one of the major drawbacks is the current limitation on the amount of digital content available. Plastic Logic plans to amass one of the largest collections of content available for an eReader.

Monday, February 16, Adobe unveiled its new Adobe Reader Mobile 9 SDK (Software Development Kit), which will enable companies to more easily distribute and display ebooks in PDF and EPUB formats on mobile phones, ereaders and other mobile devices.

Hearst Publishing is attempting to become the first publisher to enter the ereader market with a model geared toward magazines. Hearst made news last year when it published the first magazine using E Ink, so it's no strange to pushing the envelope for its business.

Analysis of the environmental impact of e-readers.

Renewed interest in creating beautiful books as a response to ereaders.

Use OverDrive, an alternative to Amazon's Prime accounts only Kindle Lending Library program

Publishers need to recognize that readers are shifting to ereading, and for this group if it's not in e-book format it doesn't exist.

The high price of e-readers ($650) is going to be too much for many. I haven't seen any content incentives and I think that might be able to lure a few people in. For example, with the purchase of an e-reader you get a yearly subscription to a magazine and newspaper of your choice.

"The Sony Reader, priced from $180 to $300, will probably be offered with hardware and software improvements in August, Phil Lubell, vice president of digital reading at Sony Electronics, said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco."

Interesting debate on the value of trade publishers in the digital era.

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.

The Kindle isn't only for reading. It's for selling non-book stuff on Amazon, too. And Walmart doesn't like that.

Latest data on sales of ebooks.

E-books monthly sales up 250% over same month last year, and highest monthly sales ever recorded.