I’m sure it’s more complicated than I understand, but right now it sounds a lot like the type of page and asset caching that Opera uses (used?) for its mobile browser, or that some cable companies use to reduce download times for customers.

Since Amazon Silk essentially routes all of your web browsing on the Fire through Amazon’s servers, it also raises a significant privacy question, but so far today I haven’t seen many mainstream media types address that. After all the dorky excitement over consumer technology dies down, I imagine we’ll start seeing headlines like “Do you trust Amazon with your web browsing?” and “Amazon Silk lets Bezos watch your every move”.

Update: The Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions agreement mentions that you might have the option to turn off the Amazon server caching and browse the web as you normally would, but since the word “generally” pops up several times in that section, I don’t think Amazon is making any legally enforceable guarantee to absolute privacy. (And that’s if you can turn off the Silk functionality on the Kindle Fire at all—there’s some confusing wording in the Terms that suggests the Silk browser may be on a “computer” instead of the Fire tablet when this feature is offered.)

Before the end of this year, someone shopping for an ereader device will be able to choose from five price points for a Kindle, from $80 to $200, with the top end offering a decent low-cost alternative to a Nook Color or an iPad. Actually, the $80 option is available starting today.

You should know, however, that all of the E Ink Kindles come with the “special offers” screensaver ads; expect to pay at least $40 extra if you don’t want to see advertising. The Kindle Fire tablet doesn’t include the screensaver ads and is only offered at one price.

$79 – Kindle – Wi-Fi only, dpad navigation, no physical keyboard. (It’s the middle device in the trio above.) Available today.

$99 – Kindle Touch – Wi-Fi only, touchscreen navigation, no physical keyboard. (Device on left in trio above.) Ships in November; U.S. only.

$149 – Kindle Touch 3G – Physically the same as the $99 model, but includes free 3G wireless access. Ships in November; U.S. only.

$199 – Kindle Fire – Color 7″ touchscreen, runs Android apps, designed to display all types of entertainment content, including games, music and video. Ships in November; U.S. only.

Here’s an in-context shot of the Kindle Fire so you can get a better idea of how small it is.

Does it upset you that all the new Kindles lack physical keyboards? Don’t worry—for now at least, what we know as the Kindle 3 will still be available in Wi-Fi and 3G flavors for $99 and $139.

I’m not sure anyone thought we’d break the $100 barrier so quickly and by so much, but I think this demonstrates just how closely Amazon is following Apple’s successful iPod strategy—with iPods, Nanos and Shuffles at multiple price points—from last decade.

I’ve checked out the fine print and I don’t see any hidden gotchas, other than that the $100 code has to be used within 90 days, and if you cancel your Audible membership after the first month, you’ll have to pay for the remainder of the 12-month membership. (You can cancel within the first month without incurring the penalty, but you’ll have to go ahead and pay $14.95 if you’ve already used your first credit, and you’ll have to give up the code of course.) You also have to be a new Audible member to take advantage of this offer, or at minimum you can’t have signed up within the past 24 months. I couldn’t find details on which countries are eligible for the offer, so you’ll have to contact Amazon or Audible to ask.

Frankly I agree with the online chatter that right now is probably a bad time to buy a new Kindle, since it’s likely that a newer model will be announced very soon. The Audible offer is good until the end of January 2012, but the fine print says the $100 code has to be used within 90 days of receiving it, so you might want to bookmark this page and come back once Amazon reveals pricing and availability on the next Kindle model.

Finally, let me make it clear that this isn’t an advertisement—no one is paying me anything and I won’t get any kickbacks. I’m writing about this deal because I think it’s a good one, if you already want to buy a Kindle and want to join Audible. (It was an easy choice for my mother, for example, since she loves audiobooks.) I’m also writing about it because I’ve noticed that even though the offer is valid until January 31, 2012, it’s all but disappeared from the Amazon site, at least for me. (I realize everyone sees a custom version of Amazon based on purchase patterns). So this is my attempt to publicize it a little more.

Update: Wow, I have a terrible memory. It looks like I wrote a very similar post (with almost the exact same headline!) eighteen months ago, when the offer was first announced. Ah well, it’s still a good deal…

The full story along with device specs is over on Teleread, but here’s my interview:

What was the inspiration for this?

Susan Edwards: Although our books are or will shortly be available through all the major ebook vendors, we do still have a lot of loyal customers who buy almost solely from our website. We wanted to provide them with a non-proprietary reader that they could use for all their ebooks, but that would also make it easy to continue to buy directly from us, where they still get the best price and can take advantage of all of our sales and purchase incentives.

Plus, we do a lot of conventions, trade shows, contests, p.r. and giveaways. We had been purchasing proprietary e-readers for those purposes and thought, why not have our own e-reader? It’s great advertising and it, again, makes it easy for people to come to our site and buy directly from us.

This model, which we’re calling the eCave C71, is a very limited edition test run that we are rolling out at our RomantiCon convention. We will give many of them away as prizes, and so will be able to work closely with a limited population of users to make sure the device does everything they want it to before deciding on future models and functions.

Can you provide some details on the device? It looks like the Prology Latitute T-701.

SE: It’s very similar to that one. It wasn’t manufactured by them, but has very similar specs and does use the same operating system.

This first model does not come with a cover, though it fits the sleeves available for the Nook and the Kindle 3. Right now, we’re testing the water with the device to gauge interest. If we decide to go larger scale, we will probably have a selection of our own covers to choose from.

You mentioned a “vibrating key” functionality. What!?

SE: It’s a tactile feedback function, like the clicking sound you get when you tap keys. We chose the vibration rather than the usual click mostly just for fun. We are, after all, primarily an erotic romance publisher, and we like to have fun with that, so we often inject a note of fun around the sexuality of our content.

Have you set a price?

SE: We are still working on determining an exact price point. We would definitely like to sell it for less than other e-readers, with some built-in purchasing incentives: something like a combination of free e-books preloaded on the device and a discount on the purchase of additional e-books. We are looking at different models in a range of prices for the future.

How does EC plan on handling warranty and service issues?

SE: We have a great customer service department, so most of the support issues will be handled via that existing department. Any problems we can’t solve through that avenue, we will work directly with the manufacturer on and we will replace any faulty devices. That’s part of the reason we are starting out small, to make sure we are getting dependable devices from reliable manufacturers who stand behind their products.

The similar Prology and Digma models seems to offer a lot of extra functionality, like a radio, photo viewer, voice recorder app, calculator, and so on. Will those things be in the EC model, or is it going to be customized to work solely as an ebook reader?

SE: The ECave C71 features photo, music and video functionality. It truly is a multi-media device at a fraction of the cost of most tablet PCs. It does not feature wireless connectivity but can be accessed via the usb cable provided or by loading various media onto a separate MicroSD card.

Do you see this as a way to exert some control over your market segment when it comes to ebooks, which is currently dominated by huge companies like Amazon, Apple and B&N?

SE: Many of our customers have been buying, downloading and reading our books on their computers and other digital devices for years. We have always worked to keep up with their preferences by providing our books in whatever format they prefer so that we can retain them as customers. This is really just an extension of that practice, and it very definitely does help us to retain direct access to our market segment.

I finally got to test drive a Nook Touch yesterday, right after sitting in a coffee shop reading my Kindle 3 for an hour, and I have to admit I was instantly in love; I wanted to leave my Kindle 3 behind at Barnes & Noble and bring home a Nook Touch instead. Even anchored by a security cable, it felt lighter and easier to hold while reading.

But that was only a brief infatuation, and this morning I’m glad my Kindle is still with me. Because as much as I loved playing with the Nook Touch, I’m not willing to come on board until Barnes & Noble fine-tunes some issues with the device and its customer service.

Two notes before I begin:

• These won’t be dealbreakers for every consumer, but they’re real issues that you should be aware of.
• If you’re savvy with computers and/or consumer technology, the Nook Touch can be rooted and you can do all sorts of fun things with it, so some of the limitations below won’t apply to you.

1. There’s no way to email yourself documents or web pages

If you want to sideload personal documents or ebooks, you have to do it via USB cable while the Nook Touch is tethered to your PC, or load it onto a memory card and insert that into the Nook Touch.

By comparison, every Kindle is assigned an email address upon purchase, and you can email various documents to it from anywhere. Lots of third party developers have taken advantage of this to provide easy ways to send your Kindle web content, including Readability (my new favorite), Instapaper and Read It Later. You can also set up Calibre, the free ebook library manager, to email RSS feeds or ebooks to your Kindle.
 

2. The browser is hidden and may not be as functional as the Kindle browser

Although Amazon has always called it an “experimental” feature, every Kindle model so far has come with a web browser that you can access directly. The Kindle 3′s browser is in fact fairly advanced and does a great job at HTML rendering.

You can access the browser from a Nook Touch, but not in an obvious way—there’s no menu option, so instead you type a URL in the search field. (The Kindle 3 offers this shortcut as well, but it’s in addition to the menu option. Amazon also advertises the web browser as a feature, whereas B&N makes no mention of a web browser at all in its Nook Touch marketing.)

I’m pretty sure the Nook Touch demo unit I played with was set up to kick me out of the browser after a short period, but I was never able to get beyond a Google search page using the search field shortcut. On Google, I could then search for another page, but inevitably the browser would quit and I’d be redirected to the Nook’s home page.
 

3. Activating the Nook Touch is a pain

Teleread has published a detailed review of the Nook Touch by a blogger named John Schember, and while it’s mostly positive, his description of the mandatory First Run Wizard shows just how far B&N still has to go before mastering the “it just works” design philosophy.

First, John says, you have to be online so the Nook Touch can be activated by B&N’s servers. If you can’t get online at home, you have to go to a B&N store or somewhere with free public Wi-Fi. By contrast, Kindles bought from Amazon ship pre-registered, and in fact you can still use your Kindle to read ebooks even if you never register it or activate the wireless connection.

Next, you have to agree to a 178 page Terms of Service document. Most of the legalese is for the B&N account that you will use with the device, but it’s still an unsettling experience to pay for a device outright and suddenly be forced to agree to a lengthy list of things you can and can’t do on it. As John writes, “It’s my reader, I bought it, I’m not renting it from B&N, they should not be dictating anything to me about the use of my property!”

And finally, you have to have a B&N account. John sums up the problem with this pretty clearly:

Again I do not want my Nook connecting to the internet. I do not want to download books using the Nook. I do not want to register it with my B&N account. I do not use the connectivity features nor do I want them. The Nook does not make this an option. You must sign into a B&N account which registers the device with B&N before you can use the device.

Certainly most people will expect and want the Nook to be able to easily connect to B&N, but if you’re not one of them, you’re out of luck.
 

4. Barnes & Noble uses the home screen for advertising

One result of the forced registration, notes John in his review, is that B&N loads samples onto your Nook at the end. You can archive them so they’re removed from your Nook, but again, by comparison Amazon treats your Kindle as your Kindle and doesn’t put any ebook on it without your permission.

Worse than that, in my opinion, is B&N reserves nearly 50% of the home page to market new books to you in the context of “expert suggestions.” B&N doesn’t make it clear how this section will work—in some shots it looks like your friends’ recommendations will appear there (assuming you have extroverted friends with Nooks), and in other shots it looks like the company will suggest titles. Either way, it’s outside content that’s intended to get you to buy more books.

Amazon does include advertising on special discounted Kindles, but the difference is you have to essentially opt-in (by choosing the “special offers” model), and Amazon compensates you with a $25 price cut. If you just want to compare where book recommendations appear, on the Kindle they show up when you visit the store on your device. Otherwise you don’t see them.

It’s true that at least Nook’s ads are for books, not (as with Amazon) credit cards or special sales. Still, this means that every time you activate your Nook to start reading, you’ll be hit with the E Ink equivalent of in-store advertising from Barnes & Noble.
 

5. Barnes & Noble customer service is awful

Amazon offers a refund policy for Kindle purchases. Barnes & Noble does not. To me, that alone is enough of a differentiator to make me want to shop from Amazon, but it won’t sway everyone.

Here are a couple of more subjective examples that I think illustrate how crummy B&N is with customer service:

First, in John’s review, he mentions that by default B&N sometimes pushes his Nook files to him in PDB format. PDB files work on the first Nook but not on the Nook Touch. When John called customer service to find out what he could do, he was told he simply couldn’t read those books on his Nook! After some online searching, John found that he was only receiving PDB files because he was using a Mac, and in Safari you can fake a different browser’s identity (e.g. Firefox or IE) and receive the EPUB format instead.

The point is, B&N’s own customer service was useless, and in fact essentially told John he couldn’t read the Nook ebooks he’d paid for, without offering a solution. John writes:

B&N support is terrible and will often make you more confused than help you. I am not confident in B&N support and there is quite a bit of miscommunication throughout the company.

Second, my own recent personal experience with B&N’s customer service was hands down the worst I’ve had with any company in at least five years. I’d purchased a Groupon offer and gave the code to my sister, who then applied it along with two gift cards to a big order of books for her sons. Everything we did was within the rules of both Groupon’s and B&N’s fine print (believe me, I quadruple-checked), but B&N’s overzealous fraud department flagged her order and canceled it without explaining why. The easiest thing would have been to walk away and buy the books elsewhere, but we now had two gift card balances and a Groupon purchase invalidated, so we were forced to deal with it. It took—no kidding—ten business days and over twenty phone calls, along with at least three order reversals from active to canceled to active again, before B&N sent the books. And then they left out two of the titles. Their fraud department still thinks my sister is some low-rent con artist, I think.

Although that concerned physical books and not the Nook, it soured me on B&N for a long time, especially since the problem wasn’t with physical inventory but with payment types (meaning it overlaps the Nook space). I’m not surprised at all to see that John couldn’t get any useful information about the format problem when he called.

For my needs, the first issue—not being able to email myself content—is a huge problem. I use my Kindle as an extension of my desktop, shooting web pages and articles over to it so I can read them later when I’m not at my desk, and I like the fact that I can email ebooks to it from Calibre.

I’m guessing the online/registration issues are less bothersome for most consumers. After all, the Nook is designed to work with the cloud, and to do that it has to be online and registered.

I think customer service is a big deal, though. My personal experience with B&N is an extreme case, but I also hate the lack of a refund policy, and as John discovered you may not be able to trust B&N with even basic technical support if a problem arises.

There are plenty of well-documented reasons to buy a Nook Touch, so I’m not saying it’s a bad choice. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into before you commit to it.

PCMag’s reviewer, David Pierce, stacks the deck against Amazon slightly by comparing the $190 Wi-Fi/3G Kindle with the $140 Wi-Fi only Nook Touch. A more straightforward comparison would be the $140 Wi-Fi only Kindle, or even the $114 ad-supported version. Once you remove the misleading 3G price difference, the real features to compare are the input mechanics (physical keyboard vs infrared touchscreen), the user interface, and the battery life.

Pierce writes that the Nook Touch beats the Kindle in all three of those categories. Its home screen is more intuitive and more attractive than the Kindle’s, and its touchscreen interface generally offers a much better way to interact with books, from turning a single page to quickly scrubbing through multiple pages at once. The Nook Touch is also smaller and lighter than the Kindle 3—imagine the Kindle 3 sans keyboard—making it even more pocketable.

However, Pierce notes that it’s not exactly easy to jump from the Kindle platform to the Nook, since both companies use formats that are incompatible with other devices. If you’ve already invested lots of money in a Kindle library, you’re sort of stuck with Amazon unless you’re willing to strip any DRM and convert the files yourself.

There are three points the review touches on that I think deserve more emphasis to help a consumer decide what to buy. First, if you want 3G you’ll want to stick with the more expensive Kindle model. Second, if you want an easy way to customize your home screen with screensaver images and you don’t want to install a hack, the Nook Touch is a better choice because it supports custom images right out of the box. Third, the Nook Touch will support library ebook loans, something the Kindle can’t do—Amazon has promised this functionality later this year, but so far hasn’t provided details.

And finally, there’s one thing I disagree with from the review, and I think it’s also an important factor in making a purchasing decision. Without explicitly saying it beats Amazon, Pierce suggests that the Barnes & Noble Nook store is just as good or better, but in my experience the Amazon Kindle store easily bests it in every way. For example, Amazon has a seven day refund policy on Kindle books, while Barnes & Noble has a no-refunds policy. Amazon also has a bigger selection if you don’t count public domain works, and I don’t since they’re freely available for pretty much any device. Finally, in my experience Amazon offers better prices if you exclude agency-priced books, which are the same price everywhere. Of course, as I mentioned above, if you know how to remove DRM from ebooks then you can shop pretty much anywhere you like.

On average, it seems clear that the Nook Touch is the new champ in the no-frills ebook device category, and although nobody has had a chance to put the forthcoming Kobo Touch through its paces yet, I suspect that it will place second in a comparison of hardware and user interface (although Kobo’s store is probably third after Amazon and B&N).

That puts the Kindle 3, viewed by many as the best device on the market for the past nine months, in a surprising third place. Unless Amazon incorporates a similar touchscreen or comes up with some other killer feature in the near future, I imagine a lot of ebook consumers are going to be buying Nook Touches this year. Most likely I’ll be one of them.

“Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader” [PCMag.com]

One of the new-and-improved features that Barnes & Noble promoted yesterday when it announced its new touchscreen Nook was a battery life of two months. Two months! Theoretically, if I got one in mid-June, I would only have to charge it three times before the end of the year. By contrast, my Kindle 3 only claims one month battery life, and in reality I have to recharge it every week and a half because I leave the wireless connection on all the time.

But CNET reported something strange today: overnight, Amazon doubled its battery life specs, and now it says the Kindle 3 will also last two months.

Your first thought, especially if you’ve been viewing the new Transformers 3 trailer online recently, might be that your Kindle 3 is evolving and will soon become self-aware and deadly. Not as deadly as those movies, but still.

But you can relax; what this really means is that from now on, you’ll have to view estimated battery life numbers skeptically, because it has now officially become a bit of meaningless marketing copy for Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

You can blame B&N for this one. As part of the company’s aggressive strategy to position the new nook—officially and unfortunately called “NOOK, The Simple Touch Reader”—B&N has isolated the most extreme usage scenario to support its battery life spec, trading accuracy for sound bites. To make one of the latest E Ink 6″ ereaders last two months, notes CNET (by way of both Amazon and Kobo), you’d need to keep the wireless turned off and only read it for about 30 minutes a day.

Kobo’s CEO Michael Serbinis tells CNET that in fact, the new Kobo touchscreen reader, which has the same size Pearl E Ink screen and same infrared touch technology as the new Nook, will also last about two months—if you almost never use it. “But that’s not a typical usage scenario,” he concludes.

So when you comparison shop ereaders in the coming months, assume that, at least for the big three brands, if the hardware is about the same then so is the battery life.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Barnes & Noble stands by its claim that the new Nook far outlasts the Kindle 3 on battery power. The company’s digital products president says B&N performed a page-turn test, similar to the one Jordi B. suggests in the comments below, and “In our side-by-side tests, under the exact same conditions, continuous use of the device resulted in more than two times Kindle’s battery life.” From the paper’s Digits blog:

While reading at one page a minute, the new Nook battery lasts for 150 hours where the Kindle battery, using the same page-turn rate, lasts for only 56 hours, said Jamie Iannone, president of Barnes & Noble’s digital products unit, in a statement issued Wednesday. The company has also done a continuous page turn test and at one page turn per second, the new Nook offers more than 25,000 continuous page turns on a single charge, he said. (All the tests were done with Wi-Fi off.)

“Kindle battery life doubles overnight” [CNET]

There’s lots o’ fine print as always, but the main rules are you have to be a legal resident of the U.S. or Puerto Rico, and be 18 years or older. You can enter twice.

“Mobile Million Sweepstakes” [via Android Community]

Original post: If you wanted to use custom fonts or screensaver images on your Kindle but haven’t yet applied the jailbreak hack, make sure you do it before you update to the latest Kindle OS.

But hurry: Amazon is now pushing the new 3.1 software update over the air to all customers, and in fact you may have already received it and never noticed the change. (Open the “Settings” menu and check the bottom of the screen.) It brings several new features like page numbers and a more efficient magazine layout. Unfortunately, it also blocks the method in which the jailbreak hack was applied, as this MobileRead forums post explains:

It used to look for any public key which meant it would use the one added by the jailbreak. They’ve now altered it so that it specifically only checks the two Amazon Kindle public keys. This means all hacks will NOT be able to be installed.

The good news is if you already applied the hacks, they’ll continue to work. My custom screens are still working fine and I don’t even know when the 3.1 update was applied to my Kindle — I discovered it just a few moments ago when I checked my Settings screen.

The bad news is if you wanted to apply the hack but Amazon already updated your Kindle, you’ll have to wait until someone finds a new workaround — but fortunately someone is already working on it. Here’s hoping this setback is only temporary.

(Photo: AMagill)

Free case with purchase of ereader

Best Buy is giving away free cases up to a retail price of $45 if you buy select ereaders, including Nook, Nook Color, Sony Reader and Kindle. The Kindle is only available in store, and Nook Color is backordered because Barnes & Noble has pulled them temporarily (the rumor is B&N is updating them so they can’t be jailbroken). Here’s the website offer page and here’s the Best Buy Sunday insert ad (see page 9).

Coupon code: buy case get 50% off second one

M-Edge is offering a 50% discount on a second case if you use the code SHOPVDAY11 at checkout. It’s not a huge discount, but if you’re in a two-device household it might be worth it.