As most people know by now, Barnes & Noble is releasing a new Nook Color e-reader in a few weeks, and that e-reader's color screen is an LCD. As soon as the company announced that its new e-reader had an LCD and not some sort of more exotic screen technology, some readers cried foul. In fact, the first comment out of the gate on our Barnes & Noble unveils Nook Color post was about eyestrain.

"It's very neat-looking, and the price point seems aggressive enough to make an impact for sure. That being said, is eyestrain an issue? I thought the benefit of e-ink was a combination of ease of reading, outdoor or well-lit reading, and battery life..."

A little farther down, another commenter wrote: "LCD technology for an eReader is going backwards for me. It's not that reading on an LCD is so horrible for me, but rather reading on an e-Ink display is so much more pleasing to my eyes."

Other readers came down more favorably on the side of LCD, saying they stare at a computer screen all day and it doesn't bother them. However you look at it, though, the Nook Color hasn't even hit stores yet and the debate over eyestrain is already raging. We got some of this when the iPad came out, but the discussion is more amped up because Barnes & Noble is calling the Nook Color the "reader's tablet," whereas the iPad hasn't been marketed first and foremost as an e-reader.

When we asked William Lynch, Barnes & Noble's CEO, about the potential for eyestrain with Nook Color screen, he said the company had done extensive research on displays and discovered that eyestrain with LCDs was not the huge issue many people were making it out to be. Furthermore, the company is also using a high-resolution next-generation panel from LG that's backlit with LED.

Now, it's not that I don't take Mr. Lynch at his word, but I thought I'd put in a call to an impartial third-party who might be able to shed some light on the issue. So I dialed up my ophthalmologist, Dr. Mark Hornfeld, who has a practice in Manhattan. I said, hey, Mark (yes, I call him by his first name), do any of your patients talk about reading with the iPad, Nook, and Kindle? Are people concerned about eyestrain when using these new e-readers? What's the deal?… Read more

At yesterday's Apple earnings call, CEO Steve Jobs quelled rumors that the company was on the verge of producing a smaller 7-inch iPad to counter the arrival of such mini slates as Samsung's Galaxy Tab. He said that these devices were "tweeners" and would be dead on arrival. He scoffed that normal-size human fingers are simply too big to be able to accurately hit icons on a screen that size.

"Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff," he said. "There are clear limits on how close you can … Read more

A French fellow who goes by the handle Crazy Nawak e-mailed me some concept photos for a "multi-OS" smartphone from HTC that would allow you to switch between two operating systems. HTC already has the old HTC Touch Dual, but the "dual' in that phone stood for the combination of a slide-out keypad and a touch screen.

This fantasy model has a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and runs both Windows Mobile 7 and Android 2.2 (see more photos here). Of course, plenty of people out there have already hacked Windows Mobile phones to run … Read more

As someone who covers the e-reader market, I get a lot of questions about which e-reader is the best and whether it's better to read on the iPad and its large LCD or an e-ink display like those found on the Kindle, Nook, or Sony Readers. That's all well and good, but in my e-reader travels I've discovered a disturbing trend: a lot of people barely use their e-readers and sometimes even relegate them to what I fondly refer to as the-drawer-where-gadgets-go-to-die.

I can't give you any real data (which is why I've included a poll below), but my own informal survey suggests that about a third of e-reader owners rarely spend anytime using their devices, another third does some reading, and finally, the last third is made up of heavy users. The latter group seems to be made up of voracious readers or frequent travelers/daily commuters who find an e-reader incredibly convenient for storing a lot of reading material, including newspapers and magazines. Some of these folks are actually reading more now than they ever did before. Kudos to them.

Of course, many people never asked for their e-readers (they received them as gifts), so you can't blame them for not embracing their new gadgets. One woman in our office who counts herself in this category says she prefers paper books ("I like holding the actual book") and while she reads a lot, she didn't love reading on her second-generation Kindle. When she did try it out, she says she found herself downloading free or very cheap books and thought most of them were really bad. Some of these were self-published.

"I admit it," she said, "I'm kind of cheap. And if I'm going to pay like $10 or $12 for a book, I'd rather get the paper version." So oddly, she began to associate her reading experience on the Kindle with cheap, bad books and has left it in a drawer for months.

Another friend told me he'd only bought two books on his Kindle. "I was kind of excited at first so I downloaded some free classics and a book on Einstein that I was interested in," he said. "And then I just kind of lost interest. There were enough paper books lying around--or you know, people just passed on books. I had plenty of stuff to read."

A lot of people complain that e-books are too expensive and that they expected them to be cheaper when they invested in an e-reading device. Recently, for instance, a few best-selling hardcover titles (see Ken Follett's "Fall of the Giants") have had lower prices than their e-book versions, which enraged a vocal group of hard-core Kindle users, who encouraged a boycott of the e-book.

There's some truth to those higher prices tamping down purchases, and whole threads on Amazon are devoted to discussing not only overly expensive e-books but bargain ones as well. However, at this juncture in the digital reader's evolutionary cycle it appears as if some people are simply a good match for an e-reader and some aren't. … Read more

The Literati, a Sharper-Image-branded color e-reader, was officially announced a few weeks ago, but I spotted one out in the wild last night at a tech event in New York.

Due to hit stores in October, the Wi-Fi-enabled Literati has a 7-inch LCD screen, an affordable $159 price tag that's expected to drop with special promotions during the holiday season, and it's being targeted squarely at the mass market with distribution in such stores as Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, JC Penney, Kohl's, and Macy's. MerchSource, the company that's behind the product, says it … Read more

Several months ago I downloaded the AT&T iPhone app Mark the Spot, which has now been updated to version 2.0. Cell phone service isn't too bad in my New York apartment, but every time I had a dropped call, I'd fire up the app and register my complaint.

Now, the area where I live is in one of the denser residential areas in the city, so I don't think I was alone in registering my complaints. But just a couple of days ago, I received a text message from AT&T telling me … Read more

As we reported, a recent New York Times blog post suggests that Amazon is looking into producing more hardware beyond the Kindle. Ironically, Lab126, the division of Amazon that is behind the Kindle, is located in Cupertino, Calif., not far from Apple. And Nick Bilton at the Bits Blog points out that the job board at Lab126 has "a flurry of listings related to electronics hardware, with titles like supply chain project program manager, hardware engineer and RF systems engineer."

While some of the positions will be devoted to future generations of Kindle devices that may integrate touch screens and color (last year, Amazon acquired Touchco, a multitouch hardware company), Bilton says "there's also a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs."

The question, of course, is what sort of gadgets could Amazon be looking into building? Well, one of the anonymous sources in the article gives a small hint, saying that "more hardware products would be a means to an end and that Amazon wants to make more devices for consumers that would enable simple purchasing of Amazon content including its digital books, music and movie rentals and purchases."

I know from speaking to Ian Freed, Amazon's vice president of digital (yes, that's his title), that one of the things that Amazon loves about the iPad is that it allows users to access and purchase Amazon products, whether it's e-books or anything else Amazon sells. The article states that Amazon looked at entering the mobile phone business (again, according to anonymous sources), but that the project seemed "out of Amazon's reach."

So, in my mind at least, the most logical extension of Amazon's vision--and the product that it makes the most sense for it to build and sell--is a small Android-powered tablet that manages to undercut the pricing of Apple's competing iPad products. (I use the plural because Apple is rumored to be prepping a smaller iPad. Whether that's true or not is anybody's guess). … Read more

Recently, I sat down with Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle, to get a sneak peek at the new Kindles and discuss e-books and the Kindle business in general. Naturally, a good portion of the conversation centered on the design and features of Amazon's new e-readers, which you can read about here. But we also chatted about the e-book industry and Amazon's Kindle business in general. Here's a look at some of the more interesting parts of the conversation. Feel free to post your own analysis in the comments section.

CNET: You've been talking a lot lately about the growth rate of Kindle sales. You said it tripled...

Freed: There's actually two triplings. One is the number of e-books sold in the first quarter of 2009 versus the first quarter of 2010. And then the other is after we dropped the price of the Kindle to $189, we saw a tripling of the growth rate year over year [of the device itself].

CNET: How much of the rate of growth on the e-book side is attributable to the iPad and getting your app on these other devices like the iPhone and iPad?

Freed: Excellent question. Some numbers we haven't released before...80 percent of Kindle books we sell are sold to Kindle owners. They may have a Kindle app on a phone or an iPad or Mac or PC, but they at least have a Kindle. So 20 percent do not. I think it's a combination of the health of both businesses. The device business continues to grow with a device [the second-generation Kindle] that's over a year old, and then the content is growing both with the device sales and independently with the apps. We see a lot of customers start with apps and buy a Kindle later.

We see others who've had a Kindle for a year and half and have an Android phone and they've started using the Android phone for Kindle in the last month or so.

CNET: Now that most publishers have shifted to the "agency model" and are setting their own prices, how have the higher prices on many e-books impacted sales?

Freed: Happy to answer that. We have definitely seen a shift. We have data for the last 15 years on books. And since some of the publishers have decided to price their e-book above $9.99, we've definitely seen a shift of customers going to e-books that are $9.99 or less. The good news for them is that the selection of those books is very dramatic. We have about 630,000 books that are not public domain titles and of those 510,000 are sold for $9.99 or less. Of The New York Times best-sellers, 80 of them are $9.99 or less. So customers are voting with their pocketbook... … Read more

In case you missed it, Amazon told the world yesterday that for the last three months it was selling more e-books than hardcover books and in the last month it sold 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. It was one of those great self-serving press releases that had a terrific headline and all the blogs and major newspapers jumped on it.

Well played, Amazon. As your CEO Jeff Bezos succinctly put it, "We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle--the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189.&… Read more