As a market, ebooks and ereaders have gone from being relatively simple with a few major players to tangled web of content providers and hardware manufacturers of varying compatibility in just a few short years. The competition promises to keep prices low, features competitive and digital-rights management minimal, but it’s become overwhelming for casual consumers to step into the market and look beyond the staid pillars of Amazon of Barnes & Noble.

This economy entropy is poised to get even worse (or better, depending on your perspective) with Google announcing that they have partnered with iriver to bring the first ever ereader integrated with their open Google eBooks platform.

Called the Story HD, iriver’s ereader most closely resembles a third generation Kindle, with a full QWERTY keyboard at the bottom, integrated dictionary, built-in Wi-Fi and the standard-issue 6-inch eInk screen that we have all come to know and love. It’s a full ounce lighter than the Kindle, but is ever so slightly thicker. With two GB of storage, it can hold half the books that a Kindle can, but honestly, how many people are actually running against that capacity limit?

The real story is the integration of the Google eBookstore. So far as we can tell, it hasn’t made a tremendous splash in the ebook market, mostly due to the fact that at just eight months old, it’s not well-integrated with the most popular eReaders on the market. There are definitely lots of novelties to be found with it. The Doodle Mode on their browser reader is a nice digital distraction for kids, who can color, do mazes and the like.

Google has also done an admirable job promoting their affiliate program. While authors can certainly make money by setting up accounts with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the Google eBookstore seems to have better terms for authors and is ubiquitous in the book blogosphere. They’re even making an impact on old-fashioned book stores. Politics and Prose is one of the more popular independent book stores in Washington D.C., for instance, and they have integrated Google eBooks onto their homepage to give eReader addicts a way to support their local establishment without having to clutter their house with dead tree editions.

Google is definitely carving out a niche, but whether this iriver reader is a serious part of their long-term strategy remains to be seen. At $140 and retailing only at Target, it doesn’t seem destined for success, but time will tell.

Since jumping on the ereader bandwagon several years ago, I’ve operated under the assumption that most people who regularly buy ebooks were like me – technology-obsessed bibliophiles who were simply fascinated with the technology.

While that may have been true years ago, if indeed it ever was, I can’t help but notice that the demographic tides have turned. My mother and younger sister are the only ereading converts I’ve been able to make in my family. Amongst co-workers, the only fellow Kindle disciples I’ve found have been ladies. When taking the train to work every weekday, I share that knowing ebook-lovers nod with women far more often than men.

Is it just me? Consider:

• Of the Top 10 best-selling books in the Kindle store, nine out of ten are written by women. Amongst free books? Also nine out of ten.
• In the Nook store, the top magazines outside of National Geographic are Us Weekly, Star, Cosmopolitan, and Women’s Health.
• According to numbers released by the New York Public Library, romance novels account for more than twice the number of the next highest genre in terms of ebook rentals.

That latter point may actually be the big contributing factor to the boom in female ereader owners. They’re the perfect platform for people to indulge in romance novels. It may be slightly embarrassing to have a paperback featuring a long-haired barrel-chested Fabio type in your purse, but ereaders don’t betray your reading proclivities to the public at large. Even better, they can be purchased cheaply and discretely without fear of being judged by the folks behind the counter at your local bookstore. It’s a guilt-free experience.

The numbers bear out this trend. According to a report by Nielsen BookScan, just two percent of all printed books sold in 2009 were romantic novels, compared with 14 percent of all ebooks sold. And that was in 2009, when the nascent ereader market was still in its infancy! There were just 3.6 million ereaders in circulation by the end of 2009 compare to an estimated 11 million this year. That’s a lot of cheddar for romance writers who timed the market right.

Since the release of the iPad, fans of the e-book have debated about the future of eReaders. Is the future represented in the glossy touch-screen LCD of a tablet or the eminently readable, but obsequiously plain eInk screen?

If the talking heads at Kobo and Barnes & Noble are to be believed, the answer is both.

Kobo fired first with the announcement of their new Kobo eReader Touch Edition. It features the same 6-inch eInk screen that has come to be the industry standard, but instead of relying on buttons to navigate the fields on-screen, it sports a new infrared technology that allows users to swipe pages, highlight passages, and take notes all using a slick touch screen interface.

Barnes & Noble quickly followed up with the announcement of their own. The new Nook also utilizes that brilliant infrared technology to power its touch interface. Like the Kobo reader, the new Nook is shorter and slightly thicker than its predecessors. The eInk display also reportedly has 80-percent less “flashing” when turning pages, and sports a number of interface improvements, such as the ability to tell how many more pages are in a given chapter.

On the periphery are features like battery-life and storage size. Barnes & Noble is making a lot of noise about how their new batteries can hold a charge for two months, but those claims seem spurious at best. The Kindle is still the market leader in terms of native storage, with 3 GB standard, but both the new Kobo and Nook sport slots for SD cards, so power users can add as much as 32 GB — good for, oh, about, 32,000 books.

Of course, this wouldn’t be too much of a coup unless these new entrants were competitively priced, and they are indeed. The touch-screen Nook is debuting for an eminently reasonable $139, and the Kobo comes in slightly cheaper at $129. Compare that with the comparable third-generation Wi-Fi-only Kindle, which sells for $139 ($114 if you don’t mind seeing ads instead of Agatha Christie’s face on your screen saver), and it becomes clear just how drastically the landscape has changed.

The brand recognition alone will continue to buoy the Kindle until they can counter with their own touch-screen model, but in a world dominated by smart phones, it’s hard to underestimate the familiarity and novelty that lies within the touch interface. It’s easier to see now why the plucky folks at Kobo were so confident that they could survive the bankruptcy of their partner Borders. And for their part, Barnes & Noble can continue to pride themselves on putting out a superior product, even if their market share so far lags behind their determination.

Bookworms may soon find reason to reacquaint themselves with their local libraries after Amazon announced a new program called Kindle Library Lending on Wednesday. The fledgling program would allow customers to borrow community-owned copies of e-books from any of 11,000 participating libraries in the ‘States, and read them from the comfort of their Kindle or device equipped with a Kindle app.

Heavy readers like Christian Orlov are already enthusiastic about the prospect. “I grew up practically living in the library, but it’s hard to justify lugging around hard-cover books since my wife got me the Kindle, says Orlov, a 27-year-old grad student at American University in Washington D.C. “Free is free though, and if I can go back to lending, I’ll have to try and find my library card.”

Amazon is working with Overdrive on the project, the biggest digital content provider for libraries in the country, which lends some weight to the endeavor. According to OverDrive’s Blog, Kindle customers will be able to take advantage of its existing infrastructure and library of content, so if your local library is already an OverDrive partner, you can take advantage.

Borrowed books will work the same as store-bought books, with the ability to sync across devices, highlight text and make side annotations, traditionally a no-no in library books. If a user opts to purchase a book or lend it for herself again, those notes and highlights will be there waiting.

A Proven Model

While Kindle Library Lending won’t be operational until “later this year,” that’s no reason to shy away from library e-book lending in the interim. Other ereaders like the Barnes & Noble Nook , Sony Reader and the Kobo eReader already support lending from the OverDrive network, thanks to their native support of the ePub file format. OverDrive always offers an app for mobile users of the Android, Blackberry, iOS, and Windows Mobile platforms.

Other Options

The Kindle faithful don’t have to stand out in the cold either. As we covered back in February, sites like Books For My Kindle allow you to take advantage of the Kindle’s nascent lending capabilities to swap books with strangers. The options are limited as is the lending period, it’s true, but when you consider that most libraries only purchase a single copy of any given e-book, it’s still not a bad option.

In many ways, ebooks have given us expedited access to literature in a way that’s never been seen before in human history. You can purchase a book, just about any book, from nearly any location in the continental United States (provided you are within distance of a cellphone tower of course) at the drop of a hat. When you consider that only five centuries ago books were priceless heirlooms that could be reproduced only with considerable care and effort, it’s a staggering leap in the proliferation of information.

As marvelous as it is, ebooks don’t come without costs. While many of older generations like to wax philosophic about the missing smell and feel of holding a treeware book in one’s hands, I think one of the real unfortunate side effects of the digitalization of books has been the removal of the human element. Heading down to the local library or used bookstore afforded readers the opportunity to interact with other bibliophiles that is often lost in this newer generation. Gone is the chance to ask somebody what they are reading or to grill a librarian for suggestions in a new favorite genre.

But despair not! Stepping in to fill this void is Goodreads, a marvelous fusion of old-school book clubs, social media and book recommendation engine. The site is predicated on the notion that you’re more likely to pick up a book if it comes recommended by a real person, especially somebody you know and respect. Goodreads gives you the ability to track what friends and like-minded strangers are saying about their latest reads, so you can pilfer those suggestions for yourself. The site boasts 4.4 million users with more than 120 million books on their collective shelves, so nary a title can slip through their collective grasp.

What sets this experience above and beyond reviews on Amazon, for instance, is the that it’s tied to social media. Every time you put in a review it updates your Goodreads feed and, if you opt to allow it to do so, will post something on Twitter or Facebook as well. They offer a variety of widgets, which you can drop on to your blog or Facebook page to show off your ever-expanding bookshelf, recent favorites and/or reading challenge goals for the year. A budding competition with the latter has been a major driver of my own reading efforts this year.

There’s also no need to get together every week for a book club — now you can just start a group and get the discussion going online at your own pace in a nice forum style. The site even boasts a nice variety of lists, allowing you to see what people with similar tastes are reading at any given moment and potentially hit them up for new reading groups.

If you’re a serious reader, a Goodreads membership will get you a long way. Just being able to catalog the list of books you’ve read along with immediate post-read reviews of the material, goes a long way towards enriching your experience. The ability to weave your friends into the experience just takes it to that next level. It comes highly recommended.

With the economy in the crapper and discount online retailers putting the financial squeeze on brick and mortar book sellers, it came as little surprise when Borders, long-time book retailer No. 2, finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Borders isn’t totally dead and gone as a brand, but it seems unlikely that it will continue to exist in the shape and form we’ve known for so many years.

Part of the plan is to shutter as many as 250 of their existing stores that are simply too expensive to operate. They’re mostly in areas already hard hit by the recession, representing around 30% of their total retail space. This will bring them down to nearly a quarter of the 1,329 brick and mortar stores that they operated at the height of the commercial real estate boom in 2005.

I have heard from many who know me as something of an ereader evangelist claim that it’s the rising tide of ebooks that took down their favorite local book retailer and coffee shop, but the numbers don’t really seem to back it up. In their bankruptcy petition, Borders list more than $1.29 billion in liabilities – they were in a staggering amount of debt. eBooks to date represent less than 5% of the total book retail market, and looking at the numbers, conflating the disastrous management and the slowly shifting market for books would be incredibly disingenuous.

According to reports, the leaner, meaner post-bankruptcy Borders will put more of a focus on its customer rewards program, eBooks business, and non-book products. To me, that speaks to the fact that management still hasn’t learned its lesson. I always thought it was precisely this focus on toys, novelty calendars and low-quality crap that got them into this mess in the first place.

Fortunately for Kobo owners, my prognostication that having a Kobo put you on the wrong side of ereader history was not correct. According to the Q&A the company recently posted, the fallout at Borders has next to no effect on their operation, since Borders was only ever the mainstream icing on the Kobo-powered cake. So not only is your ebook library safe, but you will still be able to purchase ebooks from Borders.com, get technical support, and use Borders apps as though nothing else had changed.

It seems the one truly wise management decision that Borders has made in the last several years was not trusting any of their ebook operation to themselves.

For intents and purposes, it appeared late last year that Amazon was going to forever alter the ebook landscape when it announced that it was going to finally match Barnes & Noble’s biggest feature trump card – ebook lending.

Unfortunately, much like Barnes & Noble’s extremely limited lending service, Amazon restricts book lending to just fourteen days per book. Even worse, users can only lend out one book at a time, and each book can only be lent out a single time before the loaning feature is disabled for it completely. In Amazon’s version of reality, books are simply antisocial, sticking to your bookshelf after the horrible trauma of being lent out one time for a period of no more than two weeks.

Lending books on Amazon.com is a fairly simple affair. Simply go to your account page, click “Manage Your Kindle” under Digital Content, and click through your list of purchased titles looking for those elusive “Loan this book” buttons. It’s not immediately clear to me whether my collection of books is a representative sample, but only about one in three or one in four books actually featured this option, which seems to indicate the publishers haven’t given the full go-ahead.

Of course, the reasons for the restrictions on lending are obvious. Digital books lend themselves as well to file sharing as movies, music and television, so by instituting a more liberal lending policy, ebook publishers would essentially be inviting people to set up elaborate lending networks, totally circumventing the need to purchase copies of the book in the first place. In the real world, we call such sinister institutions libraries, but one can understand why Amazon wouldn’t want these replicated in the digital space. There’s money to be had, after all.

Since this is the Internet we’re talking about, people have still managed to set up a work-around. A site called Books For My Kindle opened up a few months ago, which connects users with books to lend and users looking to borrow. When you register, you set up a list of books in your account that are available for lending. Users are then able to search for books they might want to read in the database, and the site allows you to make a connection so somebody can borrow your book and vice versa.

The site depends quite a bit on the good will of all parties involved. Member ratings act as the sort of currency that keeps the site moving, and ratings are predicated on the notion that you’re going to give loans as often or even more than you receive them. Does it work as well as loaning actual books? Of course not, but it takes a severely hampered feature and renders it somewhat useful, and for that alone I have to endorse it.

The ebook world has been abuzz in the last week or so, after Apple made the controversial move of rejecting a Sony Reader Store app that would have allowed users to purchase and read ebooks from Sony on their iPhone or iPad. Apple defended the decision, citing existing app store policy that says intra-app purchases have to be routed through the Apple store, so that Apple can charge their 30% toll charge. Cue Internet outrage.

While the policy may remain unchanged, this would certainly represent a monumental shift in the way that policy is enforced. Right now, users of both the Barnes & Noble and Amazon apps are able to purchase books on the iPhone and iPad, albeit in an indirect way. Instead of actually purchasing them from within the app, they are directed to the Safari web browser, where they can then purchase them via the web. It’s not the most elegant solution possible, but so far, it’s worked.

If Apple, attempting to leverage the popularity of their devices, decides that this is all of a sudden a violation of the rules, it wedges both Barnes & Noble and Amazon between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, a 30% cut off the top almost totally negates their margins for any books purchased on an iOS device.

On the other, both companies have been actively promoting the cross-platform nature of their ebookstores, which allow you to start reading on your Kindle and pick up where you left off on your phone, PC, or other supported device. That is a feature and a promise that they would have a hard time backing away from now without losing a lot of good will with customers.

B&N and Amazon aren’t left with terribly many palatable choices. They could bend over and take it from Apple and write it off as a cost of doing business. They could abandon Apple platforms entirely. They could even try to skirt around the requirements by just burying the option to buy books within the app somewhere hard to find. It’s hard to say at this point.

Speaking personally, I’ve grown rather fond of reading Kindle books on my iPad. Based on the number of people I routinely see reading books on their iPhones on the train to work, I’d wager a guess that others feel much the same way. Whatever the fallout from this, all the companies involved would do well not to disturb the status quo too much, lest they cast aside the good will they’ve spent years building up.

Since their debut in October of 2010, games on Amazon’s Kindle have absolutely taken off. Starting with a simple slate of three word games meant to test the mettle (and vocabulary) of Kindle-owning bookworms, the offerings have ballooned to incorporate a much wider range of game-playing fare. While I am of the personal opinion that offering games dilutes the power of the Kindle as the one device where one can read without distraction, some of these new entrants are compelling because they at least appeal to one’s intelligence.

Panda Poet from Spry Fox
Price: $2.99
For all their virtues, the first round of games on the Kindle were essentially variations on board games or flash games we’d all played millions of times before. Panda Poet stood out to me as an essentially new experience, which was a big part of its charm. Panda Poet charges you with using letters on a grid to form words. When you create words, you are given points and those letters are absorbed into your panda, making her ever larger. The wrinkle is that letters have a limited shelf life, and if they expire, they turn into skulls which block the growth of your panda.

While basic to begin with, the scoring allows for a lot of strategy and forethought. Scores are determined by the total letter score multiplied by the square of however many letters are in the word. So if your letter score is 20 and the word is seven letters long, your score for that round will be 20x7x7x7x7 or 48,020 points. You’ll find yourself quickly trying to maximize your multiplier while also fending off those dastardly skulls. It’s a deep game punctuated by the inclusion of comically cute pandas, but more than anything, it just works.

Triple Town from Spry Fox
Price: $3.99
As my first non-word-based Kindle game, I was initially skeptical about whether Triple Town would be able to hold my attention. It’s a puzzle strategy game where players are tasked with building a city by matching three square tiles of the same type into ever-expanding degrees of complexity. Three grass tiles become a flower, three flowers turn into a bush, three bushes into a tree and so on. Things get tricky when enemy barbarians and wizards start appearing and compromising the flow of the game board.

Triple Town winds up feeling like some combination of chess and connect four, and can be played simply in a matter of minutes or with great care for several hours. It’s quite unlike anything you might play on a smartphone, since its simple interface seems to be more of a response to the Kindle’s limited output ability, but it has its charm for all that.

Slingo from Gameblend Studios
Price: $3.99
The only mindless game I’ve tried thus far is Slingo, a port of the old internet favorite. It’s a combination of slots and bingo. You’re given a bingo card full of numbers, and given a number of pulls, just like a slot machine. If any of the numbers that come up on a given spin match the ones on your card, you get to mark them off. There are bonuses and wild cards of various sorts, but the crux of the game is just trying to get a Slingo.

Unlike the other offerings, which actually manage to stimulate your brain so you don’t feel quite so bad about not reading, Slingo is for the most part totally brainless. The only time player input actually seems to matter is in the last four spins or so, each of which cost a certain number of points to perform. It’s a risk-reward calculation, betting on whether the outcome of said spins will be worth more than the points it takes to buy them. It’s an addictive game, to be sure, but it’s precisely the sort of game I don’t want distracting me from reading.

Based purely off the number of companies that seem to want to jump into the ebook game, you would figure that it’s a highly lucrative business with plain benefits for a company line. That may still be true, but according to reports, at least one major bookseller has stumbled, and may soon fall.

Just after the new year, Borders suspended payments to a number of its suppliers on book shipments it took in the month of December. In response, several publishers, including Rowan and Littlefield, have since suspended deliveries to Borders stores, choking off their supply and causing Borders’ stock to plummet on the New York Stock Exchange.

The source of the company’s financial woes is obvious, with third-quarter sales down 17.6 percent in 2010, even compared to the anemic numbers in 2009. They reported double the losses during that period to the tune of $75 million.

Borders is reportedly trying to work out some sort of financing with publishers, but the most likely outcome in this scenario seems to be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Borders as we know it will disappear from the face of the earth, but it does mean debt shedding and some restructuring, which will likely result in a number of store closings and reduced orders with publishers. Said publishers have a vested interest in keeping the nation’s third largest book seller alive, but their ability to help them do that only goes so far.

While a number of factors likely contributed to Borders’ troubles, their tepid approach to ereaders has to be cited as one of the biggest. They managed to put together a partnership with Kobo in 2010, launching the Kobo eReader and Borders eBookstore over the summer. Priced at $150, the Kobo had its brief moment in the sun as the value ereader in its class, but both Barnes & Noble and Amazon subsequently marked down their prices and squeezed the Kobo out of the market.

It probably goes without saying that purchasing a Kobo eReader at this juncture is ill-advised. The last thing you want is an ereader that doesn’t offer you a store from which to purchase books. There’s always the long-shot possibility that Barnes & Noble could buy them out and roll them into the fold with the Nook, but that is far from a foregone conclusion.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story, because it could send ripples all throughout the epublishing industry.