If you’ve read reviews about the nook, the new Kindle competitor from Barnes & Noble, you may have heard that you can lend ebooks to friends. But don’t get suckered in by this claim. Barnes & Noble is conveniently leaving out some crucial information about how the process works, and it turns out the “loan your book” feature is a lot less useful than most bloggers and journalists are making it sound.

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Cory Doctorow, the sci-fi author and ebook pioneer (at least when it comes to DRM and pricing), announced this month in his new Publishers Weekly column that he’s about to embark on a bold publishing experiment. He says he’s going to publish his next book on his own, or at least without a publisher’s help, as he’ll be calling in favors from professionals to help with artwork, editing, and printing. He’s going to use all the unconventional distribution formats he’s now familiar with, and he’s going to make a profit.

Best of all for the rest of us, he says he will document the process and share the results, which means any writer or publisher curious about digital distribution will be able to benefit from whatever happens. I’m rooting for ya, Doctorow.

I also think it might be interesting to look at this experiment in the context of three other online distribution experiments.

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Here’s a post I wrote for Consumerist where I point out that Amazon’s newly-clarified book deletion policy doesn’t solve the real problem, which is that Amazon can delete your books.

I must admit, it’s hard for me to come to terms with the idea of a company retaining any control over something I’ve paid for, even though networked devices by their nature must participate within a larger group. I suspect this will be one of those attitudes that dates me as future generations grow up within such a system and learn to accept it. But books are a special case in that they can contain revolutionary, heretical, or otherwise controversial ideas, which is the sort of stuff that people in power, or people seeking power, like to control. Call me crazy and paranoid, but I never want a government or legal agency wielding power over my books. Never.

“Amazon Clarifies When It Will Remove Kindle Books” [Consumerist]
(Photo: alshain49)

In an effort to promote its online ebook store, the website shortcovers is holding an iPod touch giveaway. The best part for those of you who aren’t feeling spendy is you can enter up to 5 times without making a purchase. Note: I mistakenly wrote that the entry limit was 25 when I first posted this. My apologies.

Of course, any ebook purchase between now and September 27th will also count as one of your 5 entries.

[Info page on shortcovers iPod touch giveaway]

I’ve been using the shortcovers iPhone app this week to read Kathy Griffin’s new biography, “Official Book Club Selection”–which interestingly was about 50 cents cheaper than the Amazon version earlier this week when I bought it (it’s now about 50 cent more expensive, go figure)–and I’d give it a B-. It’s not a bad app once you get into your book and start reading it, but there are some definite bugs and usability quirks that need to be addressed. But of course, if you win an iPod touch, you can also install Stanza, Kindle, or the B&N Reader app on it and read from whatever store or private collection you like.

Lastly, one bonus of shortcovers files are that you can read them online via the shortcovers website, or on your Windows or Mac PC using Adobe’s Digital Editions software. They also work on Sony’s ereader devices. Sorry, Kindle owners, you’re out of luck.

There’s no such thing as a two-paned e-ink device in the pipeline at Asustek. Give up the dream, dear reader. Today the company provided information on upcoming product launches, and yet  they were fairly quiet about ereaders. In fact, the one bit of ereader info in the DigiTimes article is attributed to unnamed “industry sources,” and not from Asus’ CEO Jerry Shen:

According to industry sources, the Eee Reader line will include 6-inch and 9-inch models, both featuring a grayscale touchscreen display.

In other words, more of the same.

If you’ve seen the working demo model of the Asus two-screen device, you can see that it’s more closely aligned with netbooks and notebooks, only without a physical keyboard. Asus has always said that their dual-screen device would have color displays and be able to play video, which isn’t a capability with any current e-ink technology that I know of.  Pixel Qi is doing some awesome stuff with their specialized screens, and I’m crossing my fingers that Asus will be using them in their dual-screen device (which actually would make them a new sort of ereader/PC hybrid)–but I have no reason to believe they will.

But my point is that the new ereaders coming soon from Asus are very likely going to be nearly identical in technology as current devices. What we can hope for, in terms of improvements, are lower price points and an open approach to formats.

[Asustek aims to ship 1 million ultra-thin notebooks by end of 2009] [DigiTimes via liliputing]