Amazon

In the last couple of years Barnes & Noble has made some big inroads into the e-book market, cutting into Amazon's huge lead. As it stands, Amazon still has about 60 percent of the e-book pie, Barnes & Noble has around 25 percent, and Apple sits at around 15 percent, with smaller players like Sony, Google, and Kobo left to fight over the crumbs. Of course, those numbers are just estimates, and depending on who you talk to, Amazon's share might actually be closer to 65 percent.

While a strong second place is not a bad position to be in, the problem for Barnes & Noble has been how much it cost to get there and how much it's going to cost to pick up more market share from Amazon and Apple, which has steadily ramped up its iBooks digital reading platform and recently launched a major digital textbook initiative.… Read more

In case you missed it, the U.S. government recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five of this country's largest publishers, alleging they conspired to limit competition for the pricing of e-books. Three of the five -- HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster -- opted to settle the case, while Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple didn't.

So where does that leave us?

Well, if you've spent any time reading through the terms of the settlement, you quickly realize not everything's all that black and white and is in fact quite muddled. For starters, a judge … Read more

What's the No. 1 requested feature people want in an e-ink e-reader?

According to Barnes & Noble, it's an integrated light, which is why the company spent the last two years developing the new $139 Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, available today for preorder and shipping in early May.

I had a chance to play around with the new Nook at a launch event in New York and, as you can see from the pictures, except for the gray border around the edge, it looks identical to the standard $99 Nook Simple Touch, which remains on the market. … Read more

Amazon has updated the firmware for the Kindle Touch to version 5.1 and it actually has a few significant feature enhancements, including one that a lot of folks have been clamoring for: a landscape reading mode.

When Amazon first released the Kindle Touch, some people were upset you couldn't turn the device horizontally and read with more words on a line (for people who read with larger font sizes, landscape reading makes a lot of sense). Landscape mode was available in the $79 non-touch Kindle but not the touch-screen step-up model, which starts at $99. … Read more

In less than a year, I've gone from mocking e-books to never wanting to buy a print book again. Blame the Amazon Kindle. I've found it a great way to read.

A new generation of Kindles came out at the end of last year, including the Kindle Fire tablet. Here's how I've found them to measure up against each other, over the past four months or so.

Kindle's cool, but e-book high prices and limitations aren't Before I dive into the Kindles, let me get two issues that I hate about the Kindle out … Read more

One of the big benefits of the new iPad's high-resolution display is how sharp it renders text--and how good e-books and other text-based content looks on it.

Apple, of course, has already updated its iBooks e-reader app to optimize it for the new display. And now Amazon has introduced a new version of Kindle for iPad that's also optimized for the new iPad's display.

Amazon says that customers reading on the new iPad will "find crisper fonts and a new library view where covers look brighter and crisper than ever."

Amazon is also bringing over … Read more

There's a new line in the sand drawn for 7-inch tablet pricing, and that number is $199.

Barnes & Noble and Amazon were already locked in a fierce rivalry in the "bargain tablet" space with the $249 Nook Tablet and the $199 Kindle Fire. Barnes & Noble delivered better specs for that $50 premium (double the RAM, double the storage, and a microSD expansion slot). But now B&N has removed the price difference between the two products by releasing a new step-down Nook Tablet that levels the playing field on both specs--halving the internal storage … Read more

With the boom in e-readers, self-publishing has become big business, and Author Solutions, one of the largest self-publishers in the U.S., has entered the DIY e-book market in a big way with Booktango.

Whether Booktango should be called an "e-book generating app" or "self-publishing platform" is hard to say, but it basically provides a free and simple way to upload your manuscript, edit it for proper formatting, then automatically serve it up to various e-bookstores, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks.

On the surface, Booktango, which bears the "beta" tag, looks fairly slick … Read more

There's been some chatter lately about Amazon opening its own stores out in the non-cyber world. Yes, we're talking physical, brick-and-mortar stores, the kind people can actually walk into.

This is all speculation, of course, but Jason Calacanis got the ball rolling with a post late last year entitled "Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction."

That was followed last week by a story in The New York Times Bits blog speculating (and citing that Calacanis story) that Amazon might just very well be exploring opening physical stores.

"For years, there has been speculation that Amazon will open its own outlets, presumably to sell Amazon-label products," David Streitfeld wrote. "The idea seems far-fetched, but before 2001 so was the idea of Apple operating its own stores." … Read more