Zack Urlocker

This week at CES, there's been a number of new e-readers announced, including Hearst Corporation's Skiff, Spring Design's Alex, Copia's slew of e-readers, and Plastic Logic's Que, as well as many others. Meanwhile Amazon's Kindle DX has gone global wireless, and Barnes & Noble is still hoping to get its Nook act together with higher-volume shipments.

While it's great to see innovation in e-readers, even more interesting is the potential of these devices to provide a new medium for magazines and newspapers. Publishers have had a heckuva time in the last few years with declining revenues, loss of daily papers, and an expectation that content on the Web is free. Heaven knows they need to do something to reinvent the future of publishing.

Yesterday Apple took the extreme step of banning a developer, Molinker, for posting bogus reviews on iTunes.

No doubt, there's some number of bogus reviews on any product review site, whether iTunes, Amazon, or elsewhere. But in this case, the developer had posted dozens if not hundreds of bogus reviews across their product portfolio.

I've been following the development of smartphones, tablets, and single-purpose devices for quite a while in this blog, but every time I think that the market for e-book readers has calmed down, another announcement in the sector adds a new competitive dimension. A couple of weeks ago, introduced its own e-book reader, the Nook, just ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Back in the summer, I openly questioned what Barnes & Noble or Plastic Logic could do to disrupt the Kindle. After all, the Kindle itself is disruptive of the traditional book market, and it's notoriously hard to disrupt the disruptor.

It looks like Plastic Logic is following the Palm Pre playbook by shipping its new eBook reader two years after the market leader. Amazon will be on its third, if not fourth, version of the Kindle by the time Plastic Logic ships its product in 2010. Still, that hasn't stopped the company from making a couple of beefy announcements.

Frontrunner KindleFirst of all, they are teaming up with Barnes & Noble to provide a bookstore of more than 700,000 e-book titles. While that's technically more than Amazon's 300,000 titles for the Kindle, if you scratch below the surface, it's less than meets the eye. Barnes & Noble has struck a deal with Google to provide access to out-of-print and 500,000 public domain books. While there's some value to out-of-print titles, there's often a reason they are out of print. And if you're hankering to read copyright-expired public domain works like Homer, Dickens, and Tolstoy, more power to you, you book geek you. (You can find plenty more public domain books over at Project Gutenberg.)

According to a story reported in the Washington Post and elsewhere, the Chinese government has backed down on its plans to require PC manufacturers to install government-mandated censorship software -- for now. It appears that the decision was made at least in part due to pressure from PC makers and Internet activists.

The government did not set any new deadline for compliance, but left the door open. According to Wen Yunchao, an editor at the Chinese Web site Netease: "The government might eventually seek to resurrect the plan and make installation mandatory."

I've been a champion of Palm for a long time, but the current Palm OS is more than a little long in the tooth. Luckily, it appears that pricing and availability on the highly anticipated Palm Pre could be announced as early as next week on Sprint and likely available in June.

[ InfoWorld's bloggers discuss the new Palm webOS and Pre: Neil McAllister offers early praise in his Fatal Exception post: Palm charges back with webOS | Zach Urlocker has good news for Palm fanboys: Palm Pre to run "Classic" Palm apps ]