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Indeed, TI’s OMAP line has had few major product design wins of late. It powers the new Kindle Fire HD tablets, the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, and a fair number of Motorola phones. Even Motorola, however, has recently switched to alternatives from Qualcomm: The company’s new Razr HD and Razr HD Maxx will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip; a change from the prior Razr models that relied on a TI OMAP.

Texas Instrument’s OMAP woes, however, could be a benefit to Amazon in several ways. First, although the up-front cost would be massive, the purchase could cut the unit costs to produce hardware such as Kindle e-readers and tablets. Currently, Amazon sells hardware roughly for cost, with hopes of recouping revenues and profits through content sales. By producing chips in house, profits could be seen on the hardware although it could time to realize such benefits; it’s not cheap to sink money into long-term capital such as chip fabrication production lines.

Having its own chip business could lead Amazon to customize the silicon so that its optimized for Amazon’s products. This approach is similar to that of Apple, which creates custom chips that are made to run iOS to its full potential. While Amazon doesn’t have a mobile operating system of it’s own, the company is using Google Android as a base with Amazon software for the user interface. With a chip business, Amazon could improve the performance of its tablets by optimizing the union of silicon and software.

This situation does cause one to think about Amazon getting into the smartphone business as well. As noted, TI’s OMAP chip already powers numerous Motorola handsets as well as my own Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset. I’d say there’s an outlier chance here as the smartphone market isn’t an easy one to crack. It’s not out the realm of possibilities, of course, and if Amazon is going to spend billions for a chip business, it will surely want to maximize its return on that investment.

That leads to one other possibility here if Amazon were to buy the OMAP business from TI: Servers. While Amazon is known as a retail and content company, it’s a cloud company when you peek inside.

The company relies heavily on its cloud services for the retail experience, Whispersync technology and its AWS, or Amazon Web Services which let users rent computing storage and processing power in the cloud. For some time, x86 chips have powered cloud-based servers, but cloud computing can be done on smartphone chips as well; an OMAP purchase could reduce Amazon’s cloud costs and even lead to custom hardware that’s more power efficient.

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Microsoft’s  $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook business gives the company a piece of an ebook reader also-ran. The Nook represents about 27 percent of the market after Amazon, which claims 50 percent to 60 percent of the market by comparison.  Of course one could argue that 27 percent is better than nothing, which is pretty much where Microsoft is now in that particular arena.

The news prompted skepticism in many quarters.

Our world has changed so much that the two hated monopolists of the 1990s – Microsoft and B&N – must cling together to even stay relevant.—
Dennis K. Berman (@dkberman) April 30, 2012

Portable devices — whether they’re pen-based tablets or e-readers —  have long been a weak point for Microsoft. This despite the near constant flogging years ago by company execs for pen-based Windows devices.  The result? Apple’s  iPad ran away from the pack and remains the dominant choice for people who actually will pay money for a tablet device.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft turned to a weak player in order to shore up its own entry into a recalcitrant business. Here are a few more examples.

Nokia for smartphone smarts

Microsoft’s alliance with Nokia announced in February 2011, raised eyebrows. Nokia, which early on had dominated in mobile phone handsets for years, had by then lost its mojo in high-end phones to Apple and Google. And Microsoft, despite several tries at a Windows phone OS, was a blip on the radar. At the time GigaOM’s Bobbie Johnson said the deal could be viewed in two ways:

 Is it the world’s most powerful software company and the world’s biggest handset manufacturer joining forces? Or is it two lumbering giants with serious weaknesses linking arms to try to weather the storm together?

Most people  would have said the latter. Early versions of the new Windows 8Windows 7.5 phone have been well reviewed, but there is still considerable skepticism that this Nokia-Microsoft combination can dislodge Apple. However, there is some thought that Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility could spark other handset makers to defect from Android to Windows.

Yahoo for Web search and content trove

In 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wanted Yahoo — mostly for Internet search to help against Google, but also for its content — IN A bad WAY. So bad he launched  a $44.6 billion buyout bid which, luckily for him, didn’t work out since Yahoo is now worth far less than that. A year later Microsoft cut a deal with a new Yahoo CEO that gave it access to Yahoo’s still-very-popular online news, finance, sports, entertainment  sites and made Microsoft Bing the default search engine for Yahoo.com.

Microsoft’s Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo.com, and Yahoo will eventually take over the ad inventory on all Bing search results, eliminating complexity for advertisers (and internal overhead).  In terms of Google search, however, the Microosft-Yahoo team hasn’t made much of a dent.

Facebook for social media savvy

In what may be the exception that proves this particular rule, Microsoft now seems very prescient for making a $240 million investment Facebook in 2007. That money gave Microsoft a 1.6 percent stake in the social media phenom which put the valuation of Facebook at $15 billion. The latest  valuations for Facebook, which is slated to go public later this year,  are in the $75 billion to $100 billion range. Microsoft uses Facebook to promote Bing search and maps, which, given Facebook’s 800 million 8 million plus users, can only help raise Bing’s profile and limit Google’s growth potential. Still, after all that, the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership hasn’t dinged Google’s search share. 

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ToddABishop

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While the Web and other digital technologies have greatly amplified our exposure to new foods and cuisines, how we store, organize, and sort that wealth of culinary data remains practically unchanged. Recipes are still largely isolated on the Web, either residing on Websites, trapped in e-cookbooks or buried within a plethora of cooking apps. They’re no different than the cookbooks sitting on my shelves or the hand-scrawled recipe cards in a recipe box – each self-contained and isolated from the recipes or recipe collections around them.

What’s needed is a standard recipe media format that can be shared between applications and the Web. Like the MP3 or ACC format used in music, a recipe needs to become a standardized digital good, one that can be bought, sold, shared, edited and annotated. A recipe file could be rights-protected or it could be DRM-free, but ultimately it would have to be readable by any recipe application, browser or e-book reader.

Testing the limits of today’s recipe tools

Last month, I experimented with creating a digital recipe library using a few of the most popular recipe aggregation apps and Web portals, but I found that piecing together all of the different recipes available online into a coherent collection was a practical impossibility. KeepRecipes, Paprika, MacGourmet, and numerous other services all scrape recipes from Webpages and turn them into neatly cataloged recipe files. While all of them can easily grab recipes from the most commonly sourced cooking sites such as the Food Network or Epicurious, they all fail to identify and capture recipes outside of those big food portals. Most cooking blogs – where a lot of truly innovative cooking resides – might as well not exist to those apps.

KeepRecipes co-founder Phil Michaelson said this is a universal problem for any recipe aggregation tool because there’s no standard format for recipe markup on the Web. KeepRecipes can’t grab a recipe if it can’t identify it as one or distinguish between the ingredients, measurements and directions sections on the page.

The big food sites are more easily deciphered because they have all adopted the recipe markup formats promoted by Google and Facebook. Called hRecipe, the microformat provides a common language for search engines and other Websites to index and interpret recipe data. Recipe cataloging tools like KeepRecipes can just as easily use those markup tags to build recipe files, Michaelson said.

But there is some resistance to the widespread adoption of those formats. Michaelson said in an e-mail:

What we need is for more newspaper Websites, recipe bloggers, and recipe search engines to embrace these markup languages.  We also need less toolbars and iframes around recipe content that disrupt sharing and parsing of Webpages. We see resistance to adding technology (that is, a recipe markup language) that doesn’t have a clearly predictable [return on investment].  Everyone from Tumblr.com and WordPress.com (which power many recipe blogs) to TheKitchn.com would empower recipe authors to publish using a recipe markup format if they could estimate the ROI.

According to Michaelson, KeepRecipes tries hard to provide that financial incentive to bloggers and big food sites alike. It will only scrape a full recipe after a member visits the Website on which it’s posted. Because KeepRecipes is also a cooking community portal, allowing members to share dishes, particular recipes have the potential of going viral, driving curious cooks back to the dishes’ sources.

But ultimately the concept of a recipe aggregator stands in the face of whatever business model a recipe publisher is using. Whether you’re the Food Network, a cookbook author, or a small-time blogger, you want to get to paid, whether it’s through advertising revenues generated by page views, selling e-cookbooks and individual recipes, or just simple recognition. If you make it easier to traffic in recipes digitally, those business models are threatened.

There’s money to be made in digital food

That’s the beauty of recipe file format. Like any other digital media it can be rights protected. Sure, there will be lots of cases of infringement, but every other form of media faces the same problem, and it’s always been easier to steal a copyrighted recipe than it is to pirate a song or movie. Today you can cut and paste a recipe from a website into an email or document or grab it with a digital notepad service like Evernote.

Adjusting business models to accommodate new digital recipe media would be easy for some. If you buy a cookbook, the publisher should allow you to download the complete library of recipes into any recipe management app, just like many music distributors have begun to encourage the revival of vinyl by packaging an album’s digital tracks with the analog record. E-cookbook publishers should do the same.

For Web-based recipe collections, the model may be a bit more difficult. An online subscription-recipe service like Cook’s Illustrated could extend its business model to include recipe downloads, allowing you to access and store its entire library as long as you are a paying member, just as Rhapsody does for music media. The New York Times and Food & Wine could make free downloads conditional on print or digital subscriptions to their publications.

Sites that depend on advertising might have difficulty making those revenue schemes work, but there’s plenty they can do to bring customers back to their sites, whether through video tutorials or recommendation engines. A food site also could charge a nominal fee to download a recipe, say 25 cents, rather than read it through the browser. Social networking recipe sites like AllRecipes.com could use paid downloads of recipe files as a way to distribute revenues among its members, creating an everyman’s recipe store.

Long live the cookbook!

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis declared that digital cookbook is a far more useful tool than the traditional printed-and-bound cookbook, and he had a pretty good example to back up his claim. Inkling publishes the digital version of the The Professional Chef, the Culinary Institute of America’s classic teaching cookbook. The shelf version is an imposing tome, but Inkling has done plenty to make Pro Chef accessible to a wider audience by stuffing it into the iPad and optimizing the cookbook for a digital medium.

Inkling laces its electronic pages with more than 100 video tutorials and other multimedia. It makes the cookbook endlessly and easily searchable in ways a standard cookbook index is not. You can annotate and bookmark favorite recipes, rather than scrawl illegibly on or dog-ear a bound page.

But a digital cookbook is still a book – you have endless amounts of flexibility within the application or e-book itself, but it remains isolated in the digital ether. No one cooks from a single cookbook, and no cookbook can claim it holds every recipe a home chef would ever need. Though Inkling has created an extremely versatile and useful tool, I would argue that by sticking with the e-book format Inkling saddled it with needless limitations.

A truly useful cookbook can’t be treated like a novel or a textbook. A cookbook is a collection of individual recipes as much as it is a self-contained work, just an album is made up of individual songs. Publishers need to distribute the parts as well as the whole.

I’m not advocating the demise of the cookbook here — far from it. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an exhaustive compendium of classic recipes, but it’s also an expression of the philosophical and culinary conviction of its principle author, Julia Child. Larousse Gastronomique is replete with recipes, but it’s more an encyclopedia of cuisine and technique than a true cookbook. If digitizing our cookbooks means atomizing the art and science of cuisine into hundreds of thousands of non-contextualized recipes, then we will have lost a huge resource.

That said, the practical side of cooking is just as – if not more — important than its art. Everyone must eat and most of us have little time to cook. The Internet and other digital technologies have given us access to countless new dishes and methods for cooking. Now those technologies  just need to provide us with a way to organize that vast quantity of information so we can actually get down to the business of cooking.

Cookbook/iPod image courtesy of Flickr user LizMarie_AK

Good Housekeeping Cookbook image courtesy of Flickr user Lori L. Stalteri

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Thanks to both the thriving enthusiast / developer community at XDA-Developers and Android allowing you to jack around the filesystems, every bit of the Fire’s software can be extracted or dumped. That means most of the apps that make the Fire work can be installed on other Android devices.

Is that a Fire on my Tab?

It turns out the Kindle Fire interface — the bookshelves that act as a home screen and launch point for all activities — is basically a launcher application, and there are a number of third-party launcher apps available that allow you to “skin” an Android phone or tablet. I figured Amazon’s launcher app for the Fire is no different, and I was generally right.

I have it installed on my Galaxy Tab, so when I hit the Home button on my slate, I can either go to the standard Samsung home screen or the Amazon Kindle Fire interface.The new interface allows for reading both e-books and magazines, which is important: One of the magazines I subscribe to on the Fire can only be read on a Fire at the moment because the content isn’t available on the standard Kindle app for Android devices.

That’s only part of the puzzle, however. In the list of extracted software, I also found an installable application that adds Amazon Video software. With this app, I can now rent and stream movies or TV shows directly from Amazon on my Galaxy Tab. At first, I wasn’t able to take advantage of the free Amazon Prime streaming feature; I couldn’t find a way to add my Amazon account to the Tab. But I found a simple workaround. I attempted to rent a movie and the software — realizing I wasn’t logged in to Amazon — prompted me for my account credentials. I then cancelled the movie rental, hit up the Prime content and was able to start streaming videos for free.

The Kindle Fire also has a revamped Amazon Store app, which I like it better than the standard Amazon Mobile app available in the Android Market. It’s not surprising that it’s better on the Fire; why wouldn’t Amazon optimize the retail experience on the device that it sells? This app, too, is in the software extract and installs just like any other .apk, which is the file extension for all Android apps.

It’s not a perfect solution

I don’t have Amazon’s Silk Browser working on the Galaxy Tab, but to be honest, that’s a non-issue for me. It’s not because I have security or privacy concerns about Silk. I’ve long preferred the speedy and feature-packed Dolphin HD Browser for my Android devices.

So far, the whole setup is very fussy and the Kindle Fire user interface crashes quite a bit. I’m also dealing with formatting issues: Both the fonts and icon images are too large for some reason, even though both the Fire and Galaxy Tab have the same 1024×600 screen resolution and density. I’m sure if I keep hacking around, I’ll be able to address that. The force closing of the interface isn’t something I’m likely to stabilize though. There’s clearly some integration points between the Fire’s software and Amazon’s cloud services I haven’t connected yet, and I may not bother, depending on how much free time I have to keep tinkering.

A better idea and a new Fire owner

Instead of dealing with the Kindle Fire interface crashes on my Galaxy Tab, I’m going to stick with my standard Samsung launcher. But I’m going to keep the Amazon Video and Amazon Store apps installed. I already have the standard Amazon MP3 app — with both the MP3 store and Cloud Player feature — because its available for all Android devices. And of course, any Android device can also read Kindle books through Amazon’s freely available software. Essentially, I have all of the Kindle Fire functionality minus the interface and the ability to read digital magazines through Amazon. Even here, there are options such as Zinio.

This makes my decision much easier now: I’m not keeping the Kindle Fire. Again, it’s not because the device isn’t worth keeping; I actually like what it does for the price. I simply don’t need redundant tablets. Of course, when my wife heard I’d be returning the Fire, she asked to take a look at it. She bought a traditional Kindle in early 2010 but doesn’t have a tablet. So I de-registered the Fire from my Amazon account last night and handed it to her. Three hours later, she finally put it down and said, “Can I keep it?”

To her, the Fire does everything she needs for a low price. She says she’ll primary use it for reading books, but likes the option to play music or watch videos from time to time; either through Netflix or Amazon. She uses an iPhone 4S for her apps and email, so these features in the Fire are secondary to her. In short, she’s the perfect target audience for the Fire. I would be, too, if I didn’t have a Galaxy Tab.

But isn’t this Amazon’s software you’re using?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the fact that Amazon developed its software for the Kindle Fire and not for other Android tablets. So using the apps and interface on anything but a Kindle Fire could be construed as taking money out of Amazon’s pocket. Yet, the very opposite is true; at least in terms of content. By adding the Fire-specific applications on my Galaxy Tab, I’ll surely buy even more digital media from Amazon in the form of books, movies, and music.

The only revenue Amazon doesn’ t get from me is the cost of the Kindle Fire hardware. And the company is either making very little profit on that, or actually losing money, depending on who you ask. I’ll call this one a win-win for both me and Amazon; especially since my wife is keeping the Fire.

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After the software update, Nook Color owners will have access to new periodical titles such as Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated, Time, Parents and Fitness, bringing the total number of available magazines to more than 200. The first four new additions include an electronic copy of the print edition, which is available freely to existing print subscribers, as well as enhanced interactive features, including videos and audio podcasts, animations, and additional photo galleries. Barnes and Noble says these new interactive features will be added to all 21 U.S. magazine titles in the Nook Color store by the end of the year.

In a press release, the company expands on the new functionality, saying:

With these embedded multimedia enhancements, magazine lovers will be able to watch celebrity interviews, see the week’s sports highlights, listen to podcasts, take quizzes, get how-to’s on arts and crafts, and even learn new exercises with fitness videos to stay in shape.  These special editions also feature a portrait-centric reading experience that’s fun and simple to use, as well as the ability to get to desired content quicker.  Just tap the article promoted right on the magazine cover or in the table of contents.

This approach of blending traditional reading with web-like interactivity isn’t new for the Nook Color. In fact, the product itself is a blend; it’s the tablet that isn’t a tablet — unless you want it to be. First and foremost, it’s a 7-inch color reading device for content sold by Barnes & Noble. But the company built a custom interface on top of Google’s Android platform, which has opened up the possibilities for basic email and web browsing. A curated application store arrived in a later software update, providing a wider range of functionality without overwhelming users or taking away from the device’s core use of reading. And it does all this for much less than most Android tablets at $249.

The reason this works is because unlike many companies, Barnes and Noble isn’t trying to compete against the iPad for its depth of functionality. Instead, the Nook Color smartly offers solid breadth: The device offers basic features that customers want in a portable device, and all of those features work well. In a sense, that’s actually an Apple-style approach. But the Nook Color appeals to more than just mainstream consumers.

Since the device’s underpinnings are Android, it didn’t take long for enthusiasts to exploit Google’s platform with custom software with the results show in this video demonstration.

The process to turn the Nook Color into a full-fledged Android tablet isn’t too challenging, and for those that are too timid to try, companies are selling a plug-and-play solution. No, a customized Nook Color isn’t the most powerful Android tablet on the market, but at half the price, people are buying it. Barnes and Noble sold one million units in the final quarter of 2010 and has taken delivery of three million Nook Color units, according to DigiTimes.

Part of the appeal is surely the price, or more precisely, the perceived value of the tablet at the $249 cost. This same value proposition has driven the stock of HP TouchPad tablets to zero in retail and online outlets. HP’s tablet couldn’t compete with the iPad and others at $400 to $500, and the company decided to liquidate stock for $99 to $149.

At that pricing, several hundred thousand consumers were willing to overlook the possibility of limited future support and third-party applications. Why? Because at $99, the tablet makes for an inexpensive slate that’s quite good at web browsing, email, and e-book reading. Simply put: The value of those activities is worth at least $100 to consumers.

Barnes and Noble has figured this out with its $249 Nook Color. HP figured it out as well with $99 TouchPads, but it can’t afford to sell the tablet at a loss: The bill of materials alone is around the $300 mark. We’ll know within a few months if Amazon has learned from this situation when it launches its expected tablet, and I suspect it has.

It’s becoming more difficult to compete against a $500 iPad and its 18-month head start over others with a similarly priced device. Instead, an inexpensive slate that does a few key features really well, but can be added to over time, may the best bet in the long run. If that doesn’t sound like a good strategy, just look at sales figures for Barnes and Noble’s tablet that’s not a tablet.

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Nook2Android sells microSD cards in various storage capacities, starting at $35 for an 8 GB card. The memory card isn’t blank though. Instead, it already has all of the files needed to turn the eReader into an Android tablet. That’s perfect for non-techies, because it’s just a matter of buying the card, inserting it into the Nook Color and then powering on the e-reader. Bam! You’ve got an Android tablet without needing to download or install any software!

Tech-savvy folks will surely pass on such a product, but it’s actually a relatively cheap and simple method for others to get more functionality out of the Nook Color. The latest version of the Nook2Android cards, launched earlier this month, have the files for both the standard Nook operating system as well as the Android tablet image. That means the memory card can simply stay in the device and users can choose which mode they want upon boot up. Prior to this, you’d have to remove the Nook2Android card from the Nook Color to use it in its standard e-reader mode.

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The Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor, that’s how. The new e-reader from the book seller does away with the black and white e-ink display of the original NOOK, instead giving it a 7-inch IPS touchscreen with a resolution of 1024×600. It also supposedly works indoors and out, and has 8GB of built-in memory, with expansion of up to 32GB possible via microSD. It plays MP4 video, MP3 and AAC audio, and has a speaker (mono) and a 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack.

At $249, it’s not really so much an expensive e-reader as it is a cheap tablet. Sure, there’s no app marketplace yet, but it does boast NOOK extras, which include games and Pandora internet radio, and there’s always the possibility of an app store down the road if the device becomes popular. It is, after all, Android-based.

The device has tremendous potential in terms of being able to compete with other Android tablets coming to market, even without apps. The big reason being that it’s less than half the price, and there’s no contract you need to sign. There’s also a large category of buyers for whom apps might not be a priority, especially if the built-in browser works well.

But can the NOOKcolor play in the same arena as the iPad? I think it can, especially with the type of consumer for whom many think the iPad is perfect. Casual users who just want a device that lets them carry their media with them and access the web without worrying too much about using and managing apps won’t hesitate to take advantage of the steep price advantage the NOOKcolor has over the iPad.

Now, I’m not saying this Barnes & Noble e-reader will unseat the iPad from its place of tablet dominance. But I do think it’ll cut into its potential market share significantly, especially among older buyers, where the iPad is popular. I’m already considering getting one of these for my mother, because all she wants in a portable computer is the ability to look at photos, watch movies, listen to music and visit a news site or two once in a while.

The casual user is the ideal candidate for iPad ownership. Kudos to Barnes & Noble for identifying what it is that a user like that wants out of a tablet-type device, excising anything else, and keeping the price incredibly low. If apps really do come to this thing, as Barnes & Noble is promising, Apple will really have to sit up and take note.

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The Beginning of the Digital Revolution

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, Steve Jobs made the case for why digital downloads would be the future. At the time, it was fairly easy to illegally download music through services like Napster or Kazaa. However, Jobs felt that people would pay a price, very reasonably set at 99 cents, to download music that was great quality and featured intact metadata and gorgeous album artwork. But does the same argument extend to digital books? The current offerings on the iBookstore seem to disagree.

Limitations of the ePub Format

There’s a few considerations to keep in mind, such as selection and format. When the iTunes Store first launched, its catalog only contained 200,000 titles. Seven years later, the catalog features over 11 million titles. While Apple hasn’t released a specific number, its website says the iBookstore features tens of thousands of titles with more arriving daily. Still for most, the selection feels a bit limited. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to replace your entire library with e-books soon.

Another consideration is formatting. A lot of digital content like books and documents are in PDF format. This is great as this format can maintain the exact structure, graphics, typeface and colors from the original source material. However, there are some trade offs. For example, zooming on a PDF document, especially on an iPad, will require you to scroll up and down, or even worse left and right, just to view everything on one page. This doesn’t make for a natural reading experience.

Content on the iBookstore is delivered in ePub format, which is essentially an XML-based web page. By using a standards-compliant format (and we all know how Apple loves open standards), the ePub format supports benefits like being able to resize text or switch typefaces. This works because the iBooks app can simply modify the stylesheet applied to the document. When you make these changes, it’s easy for the iPad to reflow the content onto additional pages if needed. But sometimes this can get a bit wonky (yes, that’s a technical term).

First, custom typefaces are not supported in iBooks. While Safari on the iPad itself will support font embedding, iBooks misses out on this feature.

Another issue is images which are displayed in-line with the text content. What this means is in an original book, you might have a few photos out to the side of a paragraph but on the iPad, they’ll just be displayed one right after the other, mixed in with the narrative. For some types of content, this may be a non-issue, but for others where the page structure is essential to the reading experience, this can be problematic.

Both of these are the top reasons why you don’t see periodicals available through the iBookstore. Imagine the implications this causes for technical books or textbooks. Isn’t the education market supposed to be a big market for this device?

Some Potential Solutions

There are some potential solutions to this. Publishers could simply display some pages as single images, as this would maintain formatting, but accessibility features and the ability to bookmark and change text sizes would be lost.

Another solution would be that authors could release specific apps for these titles. Some have followed this route, but managing more than a handful of these apps really begins to clutter up the device and suddenly, the simplicity of the iBooks app for managing your content is gone.

Since ePub is an open e-book standard, there is hope that future versions will be able to address these issues. Likewise, the iBooks app itself can also be updated to add additional functionality, however, once you’ve bought a book, you own it. Unlike how Apple offered users to upgrade to iTunes Plus to get higher bit-rate versions of their songs, its unlikely that Apple will go back and update older titles or offer “plus” versions of some of these books.

Instead, Apple is being more selective about which titles are showing up on the iBookstore. Obviously, there are no periodicals. You could argue that the iBookstore is intended for books only, but I really think that’s just the beginning, similar to how the iTunes Store began with music videos before adding TV shows and then movies. But could Apple release a different app to manage periodicals and newspapers? Perhaps and so there is yet another solution.

Regardless, the feasibility of converting your entire book collection to e-books is unlikely in the short-term, either because of a lack of content or simply because e-books are not worthy replacements of the books on your shelves. The ePub format itself still has a number of issues to address before printed books become a proverbial page from the past.

Have you used the iBooks app or the iBookstore? What are your thoughts on the ePub format? Is it sufficient enough to replace your library? Share your thoughts in the comments and tell us what you think.

So its clear that while Amazon wants to capitalize on the iPad’s hype and pre-release popularity, it also doesn’t want to go as far as helping Apple convey the impression that it’s the only tablet game in town. To me, the “Including the iPad” sounds like a begrudging admission of the “I was wrong and you were right” variety.

Of course, it might just be that Amazon would like to appeal to the widest group of potential customers possible, while at the same time acknowledging that Apple is likely to win the brand recognition fight in that particular category. Whatever the marketing logic, the actual software Amazon is previewing looks to be pretty fantastic, especially for those (like me) who are already hardware Kindle owners.

First, the Kindle tablet app will offer Whispersync services, which means you can pick up where you last left off reading, no matter which device you happened to be using. I can’t count how many times I’ve used this between my Kindle 2 and my iPhone, so I can’t imagine it being any less useful with my iPad when it finally graces these Canadian shores.

The app will also synch your notes and highlights and bookmarks across all compatible devices, including the recently released Kindle for Mac software, which can read notes and bookmarks, but not make new ones of its own as of yet.

Visually, the Kindle app looks like what you’d expect. Page turn animations are included, or you can turn them off if you’re not so crazy about mimicking a paper reading experience on your digital devices, which I most definitely am not. You can also change font size and color, and background color in order to make the reading experience more comfortable.

Kindle for tablets also supports full color images and graphics, which is great news not only for fans of comics and graphic novels, which haven’t really been a great option on the Kindle thus far, but also for textbooks, recipe books, and some more adventurous fiction that uses in text images and font color changes as narrative devices.

Finally, you’ll be able to shop in the Kindle store via a built-in web view, so you can indulge all those buying impulses on the fly instead of having to wait till you have access to a full computer. All-in-all, it sounds like it’ll give my Kindle 2 a run for its money, even with potentially eye-straining backlighting.