As many Kindle owners already know, keeping a large number of books on the device can get a bit unruly — so this would be a welcome update. It’s also good news for people on the fence about whether or not to get a Kindle or a Nook over the holidays. It appears that the Kindle is going to be the only game in town until after the new year. [Kindle Facebook via Gadgetell]

Granted, it’s a little worrisome that Barnes & Noble is taking pre-orders before letting reviewers have their say, so maybe this enforced waiting period is a good thing. At any rate, it’ll be January — well after we’ll have run B&N’s Android-powered ereader through its paces — before anyone else will be able to get one. [B&N via Bits]

The “mirasol” technology mimics iridescent butterfly wings by deploying charged, colour-inducing membranes over a layer of mirror. It’s a technology that, if integrated into Kindles today as-is, would increase battery life by an estimated 20 per cent.

Instead, Qualcomm uses that extra power efficiency to drive colour and higher refresh rates for smooth video. They contend that a Kindle with their more capable display could run about a day with its current battery.

The catch? The lead photo is a non-functional prototype (with a functional, frozen-image display). Qualcomm is offering the tech to third-party partners, and they expect you to see mirasol tech on the market by late 2010. [SlashGear]

AU: According to Barnes & Noble’s website, Nook is not available outside of the US “at this time”. _-EH

This development could be problematic for people who are waiting to test out the device in person at their local Barnes & Noble. Word is that display units should start trickling in at the end of November, but it is unlikely that there will be any units to sell. So you might have to get it sight unseen if you want to ensure delivery before the holidays (although our hands-on was promising).

For those of you that got on the bandwagon early, not to worry. Your devices are still scheduled to ship on November 30th. [Brighthand]

Based on the press release, the claim is that Barnes & Noble used information, including design details, gained from meetings with Spring Design which were intended to end in a joint product. Apparently the Spring Design camp was caught just a little bit off guard when the Nook announcements started coming out:

Spring Design Files Lawsuit against Barnes & Noble : Nook Violates Alex Intellectual Property

CUPERTINO, CA – November 2, 2009 – Spring Design today filed a lawsuit to protect its Alex™ e-book intellectual property. The lawsuit asserts Barnes & Noble misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties’ non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex’ features into its recently announced Nook e-book.

“Spring Design unfortunately had to take the appropriate action to protect its intellectual property rights,” said Spring Design Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Eric Kmiec. “We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market.”

Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.

Alex, with its unique Duet Navigator™, provides the capability for interaction and navigation techniques of the two screens and furthermore utilizes the capabilities of Android to enhance the reader’s experience by supporting interactive access to the Internet for references and links. As the first in the market to offer an e-book with full Internet browsing while reading and with easy navigational control via its touch screen, Alex is well-positioned to offer the most dynamic and powerful reading device in the market.

Spring Design is focused at working strategically with book store partners to jointly develop the market and revolutionize e-book with interactive multi-media open Internet access. “It is our desire to resolve this matter so that we can move forward together to expand and grow this e-book market with enriched user experience, bringing readers to a new level of reading enjoyment,” said Eric Kmiec.

About Spring Design:
Spring Design, founded in 2006, delivers innovative e-reader solutions and products to the e-book market, offering overall “Link Notes”, a content authoring and multi-media publishing tool as add on editions to original text. Spring Design is located in Cupertino, California with engineering offices in Taiwan and China. Spring Design pioneered its patent-pending dual screen design with Duet Navigator™ capability in 2006, and has been working with major book stores, newspapers and publishers over the last two years, sharing the vision and the capabilities of the dual screen device. Spring Design’s innovative patented technologies incorporate the seamless interaction of dual display and multi-online access in a single device, benefiting and leveraging the technology and resources of the Web to enhance the reading experience with open Internet access.

The data shows a clear rise in ebook apps over the last few months, such that they account for a staggering number of the new apps showing up in the store. It’s true! Look at the chart! But here’s the thing: this is purely a measure of how many new apps there are, not how well they’re doing. But still, why such a huge uptick? Let’s do a little experiment.

Pick your favourite public domain book. No, scratch that, pick your least favourite public domain book — something you had to read back in your first year of uni, and that you immediately and angrily sold back to the campus bookstore. Now, search for it in the App Store. Here’s our answer:

Treasure Island, a free, public domain book, is available for purchase as a standalone app from over a dozen different developers, in all kinds of containers, at all kinds of prices. And why not! The content is free, so once the developer has designed an ebook app container, he or she can just CTRL+Z any public domain e-text in there and throw it into the App Store. I have no idea if these things sell, but to be honest, they wouldn’t have to do very well to make money for their developers — the investment is minimal.

Even more to the point, if the iPhone really starts to pose a threat to traditional ereaders, it won’t be evident in stats like this — it’ll be through increased book downloads in all-in-one ereader apps, like Amazon’s Kindle, B&N’s Reader and unaffiliated apps like eReader and Stanza. That’s a real possibility, but for now, we should call this rapid explosion of redundant, overpriced, exploitative apps like we see it. [GigaOm]

Creative is also talking with publishers, a la Apple, although in their case the talks are primarily in Singapore, where they already have a number of e-learning initiatives.

Images were unavailable, although Engadget did manage to snag a source who snapped a blurry pic of the Creative UI reveal (pictured) earlier today. There will be a touchscreen, which would make this slate/tablet markedly different than an ebook like the Kindle, although somewhat similar to the Nook. That’s all for now. [Epizenter via Engadget]

Reviewing the Kindle is a unique challenge. No matter what cool technology is inside of it, no matter how many buttons or how long the battery lasts, it’s still a device that’s inherently designed to read books, a task that takes time. This isn’t something that you pick up to consume your media quickly and randomly, like an iPod or a mobile phone. It’s an investment in not only dollar terms, but also time.

The very first thing you notice about the Kindle when you take it out of its (expediently delivered) box is that its screen is on. Or at least it looks that way. No matter how many times you read or are told that e-ink displays draw no power unless they are changing, it’s still weird to see an image on the screen when turned off, which is what happens every time you flick the switch on the Kindle.

The second thing is that Amazon looked long and hard at the iPod original iPhone before designing the Kindle. Thin and white on the front, brushed aluminium on the back with a section of plastic, presumably for the built-in SIM card. Sure there are more buttons on the front of the Kindle, but this device is made for reading books, not watching video or listening to music. But the similarity in design is unmistakeable.

The device comes pre-loaded with a guide on how to use the device, as well as a dictionary. Scrolling through the guide will give you a good idea of how the device works, but rather than sit through that, I opted to get straight to downloading from Amazon’s store.

According to Laura Porco, Director of Merchandising at Amazon, the Australian Store launched last week with about 280,000 titles, which has swelled to about 288,000 this week. The US Store has about 370,000 books available to download for the Kindle. But apparently the books available for Australians aren’t a subset of the 370,000 US books – we have books the US doesn’t, they have books we don’t… And the same is true for all the new markets the Kindle is selling in. Amazon is working with local publishers and authors to try and add more content all the time. Doing a quick search of readily known Aussie authors, I got a lot of empty searches: Thomas Keneally, Matthew Riley, Kate Forsyth and Banjo Paterson all turned up blanks. Fantasy writer Ian Irvine’s Human Rites trilogy is available, but that’s it. Tara Moss, for better or worse, has a couple of books available too. Still, given time, we’ll only see more Aussie authors pop up on the device.

The built-in 3G Whispernet service works pretty well. It uses an AT&T SIM card and a global roaming arrangement, which doesn’t actually cost you anything – there are no subscription fees or mobile data plans involved. There is a slight premium on book purchases, but we’ll get to that later. Exactly what network it works on in Australia is unknown – Amazon were as tight lipped as Apple about specific details, and looking at AT&Ts roaming website, it looks like they have arrangements with all the Aussie telcos. In any case, downloading a book takes less than a minute – even for something as chunky as War and Peace.

Actually using the device is pretty easy. The next page buttons are big and conveniently located – it’s easy to walk and read – easier than with a real book, anyway. The keyboard’s kinda horrible, but considering it has limited use (both searching for books, searching for text within a book or taking notes), it’s not a big deal. It’s certainly no worse than using touchscreen input on a Winmo or Android device.

What some people may find irritating is the slow refresh rate of the e-ink screen. In a world where LCDs have 2ms refresh rates, the fact that it seems to take almost a second to change the image on screen could prove frustrating. Personally, it doesn’t phase me considering it takes about the same amount of time to turn a page, but that’s just me. In any case, e-ink is an ideal format for a digital book – reading in bright sunlight is no problems whatsoever, unlike an LCD.

Another potential issue for customers is the fact that everything is in US dollars. both the device itself, and the books you purchase for it, are all charged in US dollars. While that’s all well and good now, while the Aussie dollar is kicking arse and taking names, if it drops down to the 50 cent mark again, you’ll end up paying almost double for the same book. Amazon may change this in the future – they said that they’re running everything out of their US site for convenience rather than profit – although they refuse to comment specifically on future plans. As it stands, you can grab classics for $US2.99, with new releases going for $US11.99, and a whole raft of pricing in between.

If the dollar does crash though, it’s worth noting that the Kindle does read mobipocket files, which you can copy over via the included USB cable. By checking out Project Gutenburg, you can download hundreds of out of copyright books for free and read them on the Kindle. It also does plain txt files, although there are some weird formatting issues with that…

While we’re on the topic of the USB cable, it’s also worth mentioning that the device doesn’t come with a wall charger, just a USB cable. Not so big a deal, until you discover (as Jen Dudley at the Courier Mail did in her review) that the Kindle won’t charge with a USB wall charging adaptor – it only works plugged into your PC. Weird decision on Amazon’s part.

A couple of other things I haven’t mentioned: You can change the font size easily, which is great for those with weaker vision, and the text-to-speech functionality is included as well. It sounds kinda freaky, and you’ll probably never use it, but it’s there for books that publishers have allowed it to work on. You can also subscribe to Newspapers and magazines from around the world (there’s a free two week trial), although most of the pictures have been pulled out. Oh, and no Australian publications yet either, which kind of kills the allure for me. Finally, you can use the inbuilt dictionary to look up any word in any book, which is a great way of expanding that vocab of yours.

So now here’s the question: Is it worth it? It’s $US259 worth of gadget, plus the cost of books. As many detractors have said before, that initial cost is worth a lot of books. And the whole “convenience of carrying 1500 books with you” thing isn’t really practical, as much as it’s cool.

But here are my thoughts – comparing the Kindle to an iPod is a bit misleading. If you think about it, listening to music has always required some kind of device to play the music back, whereas reading has only ever required a book. So the simple truth is that there’s no need to own a Kindle. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. It’s a well-built, easy to use and convenient device that can offer an immense level of satisfaction. Because of the size, and weight (or lack thereof), you can carry the Kindle with you everywhere, and read little by little much easier than carrying a book and having to bookmark the page when you stop. In the past week, I’ve read more than I have in a while – even reading several books concurrently, something I’ve never ever done.

So while it’s not a necessary purchase for booklovers, it’s certainly a good one, especially for the geeks among us.

[Kindle on Giz]

Barnes & Noble’s going to display the Que and Nook together with displays pointing customers to the one that’s right for them — Que for dudes in pinstripe suits, Nook for people in jeans. Not only does it mean B&N is basically offering “pro” and “normal” options for an eReader, it shows how they think of the big picture, if it wasn’t already obvious: It’s not about the hardware, it’s about the content.

Barnes & Noble (and Amazon) have apps to read their books on the iPhone and on the PC, with BlackBerry and Android to come. The device you read on is irrelevant — it’s about keeping you in their ecosystem, buying eBooks from them. In fact, the more deftly they’re able keep you hooked in on any device, the better, since dedicated eReaders are dead tech walking. The race is on now to build the most captive audience while the market’s still fresh, like spring dew or baby veal before its braised and delicious. And when Apple jumps into the game, it’s going to get a lot more interesting, not simply because of the powers of the tablet, but because they have years of experience tying people to their store for content.

Hopefully, for the Que’s sake though, by the time it hits stores it’ll have a wider footprint than the Nook will when it launches. [Plastic Logic]

Lending seemed too good to be true: Sure, we knew about the 14-day lending period, but we wondered if it’d work like a library, where you can renew a book before its due date. No such luck. As it turns out, publishers have the right to allow or not allow lending (and book publishers are at least as uptight as record labels) in the first place, so who knows if you’ll ever even get to try it. Besides that, you can lend each book one time only, forever. When you lend it, it’s unavailable for you to read, which admittedly is what happens when you lend a physical book — but THESE AREN’T PHYSICAL BOOKS. For god’s sake, let us enjoy the benefits of digital text!

I’m a little pissed off by this, especially since I was so excited about the Nook, but not entirely surprised. Despite the open-source promise of Android, owners of digital intellectual property are going to keep as tight a hold on their product as they can — even though these restrictions are far tighter than those on physical books. It’s like when Microsoft introduced the Zune’s sharing feature. They understood that people share physical media and want to share digital media, but still forced (probably at the record labels’ behest, but whatever) a three-play, three-day restriction that was so strict nobody ever used the feature. And now Barnes & Noble is following in Microsoft’s footsteps. Balls. [MobileRead, thanks Gideon!]