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What happens when you extend your brand/clout too far? Scholastic is taking heat for promoting non-book merchandise to kids, with video games causing the biggest uproar.

A major magazine is boosting its video content, most of which is pulled from other sources and curated by the magazine. Interesting way to cater to their audience and keep them coming back, not to mention advertising implications.

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.

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.

Marketers are using Web video along with - rather than in place of - television.

New bill is in the Senate that would make illegal streaming of audiovisual works over the Internet a felony offense in some cases potentially hurting YouTube. More broadly, Bill S.978 could also hurt anyone who embeds these videos, leading to 5 years of jail time.

The proposition "All that matters are authors and readers; publishers will soon be irrelevant" is debated in a video from the  London Book Fair.

This probably isn't really "news", as this was coming...but still...it's arrived.

"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?

Watch the video entitled "Discover how to use the pen when reading books". One of the features is that you can have an author autograph your e-book!

If you care about your online privacy and you use Google services, you should watch this video.

Tapping into teen trends--vampires and the push towards interactivity--novelists Laura Moser and Lauren Mechling have launched a YA serial on Slate.com with a parallel online world where their characters update their Facebook pages, tweet, and post videos on YouTube.

Mike Shatzkin discusses career longevity in publishing.  

Check out the video--very cool PDF reader.

This would appeal to me more if I didn't get visions of people watching the 60 second videos and claiming to have "read" the book (my inner bookworm is cringing). If you can have previews for movies, though, I don't see why you couldn't have previews for a book, assuming that's how they are actually used (because I'm sure we all know how Cliff's Notes and even literary Wikipedia entries have turned out so far; some people do legitimately use them to merely clarify the text, but far more use them as a substitute...).

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