We've included only e-readers (and one tablet computer) that are either developed by old media companies or have gone out of their way to partner with them; think of this as a compilation of would-be media saviors dressed up as gadgets.

Maker: Barnes & Noble (the retailer)
Name: E-Reader
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble (the publisher); access to books scanned by Google Books; a B&N e-book store. (More)

Maker: Apple
Name: Apple Tablet (unofficial)
Caveat: A tablet computer is much more capable than an e-reader, usually offering the resolution, sound and video capabilities of a laptop computer along with a full-color display.
Old media tie-ins: Apple is in content talks with the New York Times, a large magazine group and at least two textbook companies, sources told our colleagues at Gizmodo. (More)

Maker:Sony
Names:Reader Touch, Reader Pocket
Old media tie-ins: Sony has a great feature that will let you check out e-books from one the oldest distribution mediums out there: your local library. Publishers can't be thrilled with "Library Finder," to say nothing of Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Oh well!

Maker: Plastic Logic Ltd.
Name: Plastic Logic Reader
Old media tie-ins: Content deals with Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times. Digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble.

Maker: Amazon.com
Name: Kindle DX, Kindle 2
Old media tie-ins: e-Books — from fiction to textbooks — sold by Amazon; a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times; a variety of magazines, including Time. Non-participating newspapers, including those owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have complained about the paltry 30 percent cut of revenues they were offered for sales on the device.

Maker: iRex
Name: DR800SG (catchy!)
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble's e-book store. B&N gets around.

And, bringing up the rear, there are the media companies whose devices are, for now, mostly talk.

Maker: Hearst Corp. and FirstPaper LLC
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: Would presumably include content from Hearst newspapers like the Chronicle-s in San Francisco and Houston and from magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan. There has been talk of a hardware device developed by Hearst and, more recently, of an open software platform developed with FirstPaper.

Maker: Time Inc.
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: There are conflicting accounts over whether Time Inc. is interested in making this device. Former Valleywag Owen Thomas of NBC Bay Area obtained a June 2009 presentation indicating plans to finish a prototype this year; Peter Kafka's sources at All Things D said the magazine division of Time Warner is interested in creating a virtual store rather than a physical device. Either way, the company is said to be seeking partnerships with other magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents reviewed by Thomas.

(UPDATE: Added Sony Reader due to Library Finder feature.)

(Pics via Gizmodo unless otherwise noted)

A publisher changed its mind about selling George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm electronically. So Amazon agreed to just go ahead and remotely delete bought and paid for e-copies of the books from people's Kindles.

Owners got refunds, but many were still not happy. Which makes sense; your local bookstore isn't allowed to sneak into your house in the middle of the night, take your books back and leave you a check. If Amazon wants to make the Kindle an iPhone for books, it's well advised to get a bit obsessive about controlling the user experience on the device, as Apple would. But this is taking things too far.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the dilettante scion of a fading newspaper-family dynasty, obediently showed up to announce a trial in which his company will subsidize the $489 retail price of a Kindle DX for readers who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Times or the Boston Globe — assuming the latter is still publishing, since he's threatened to close it down.

The Kindle DX is a fair-looking device — homely in the way that every gadget not made by Apple inevitably is, but passably designed. But will it save newspapers? No. And Bezos is hedging his bets, even as he has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader. Today, he hawked the Kindle DX as a means for reading textbooks, sheet music, novels, and science journals. Newspapers are just one checkbox in a long list of features — and yet he's cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.

And it's not like Amazon needs the money. It's a steady cash generator — especially for Bezos himself. On Friday, he sold $63 million in Amazon shares. On Monday, as news of the Kindle leaked, he sold another $16 million. If he's such a big believer in supporting journalism, why didn't Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription? He could afford it.

(Photo by Gizmodo)

Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Why is a cable company dabbling in the e-books business? Aside from running Discovery, Hendricks has long played at being a part-time inventor. In 1999, he and two co-inventors filed for a patent, granted in 2007, on an "electronic book security and copyright protection system" which included "a portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text."

Sounds like Hendricks might have a case against Amazon.com, whose Kindle is widely viewed as the first e-book reader with commercial promise. But why does he care? The answer may lie in another patent Hendricks registered, which describes a system for transmitting e-books over "video signals" — an apparent reference to cable-TV systems. Discovery styles itself as a "nonfiction media company." Either Hendricks fears Amazon getting a lock on the nonfiction market. Or perhaps he's just wasting corporate resources to bolster his reputation as an inventor.

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones economized.

Children's Hospital star Rob Corddry stabbed, then rinsed.

New York Times writer Jenny 8. Lee planned a party with, no surprise, fortune cookies. (Yes, but is she bringing her millionaire Googler boyfriend?)

Former AOL CEO Steve Case tried to feel relevant.

Author and sometimes entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson dined alone with his Kindle.

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Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

Hearst's e-reader will be larger than the Kindle — more like an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. And it will use technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass. startup Hearst backed more than a decade ago. Hearst hopes to distribute electronic versions of its magazines and newspapers on the device, which a Hearst executive told Fortune will be out later this year.

It's like a terminal cancer patient putting faith in some herbalist's shark-bone treatment.

"The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?" asks Fortune. Uh, no. The question is whether people will give up their iPhones and netbooks for these new readers. Cheap laptops and smartphones are an irreversible trend. Factories in Japan, China, and Korea thunder out the mass-produced parts for these devices, which make their economics compelling. And a PC has the virtue of not being designed by a publisher more interested in protecting an old way of doing a business than serving readers.

Hearst has exercised its E Ink fetish before, when Esquire used it for an expensive, pointless cover. But the fact that Hearst owns a stake in E Ink is the silliest possible reason to champion the technology. Economists would call that a sunk cost: It's money already spent.

Newspaper and magazine publishers seem desperate to find some new trick to preserve the scarcity on which they used to profit. In a world overflowing with media, that is impossible. And editors and publishers are not clever technological tricksters. The E Ink reader will start out black-and-white. Wait, aren't the glossy photos and gorgeous layouts why we pick up magazine sin the first place?

What they ought to be doing is fixing their websites: Adding comments everywhere, publicly displaying the comments and pageviews stories garner, and — crucially — adjusting the story mix in light of that information. It's unlikely to happen. The makers of magazines are so used to dreaming up story ideas in their skyscraper aeries. It will never occur to them that their readers might actually be smarter than they are.

Smart enough, at any rate, not to buy a gadget designed by a magazine guy.

(Image via Gizmodo)

Host Jon Stewart seemed discomfited by his guest's wild, table-slapping howls. But any tech reporter who's interviewed Bezos knows that the Amazon.com's CEO hooting laughter is his most distinctive personal quality, the hook of every headline.

As the '90s bubble burst, observers wondered if Bezos's online bookstore would survive, as it lost money with every shipment. In 2000, then-Red Herring editor Jason Pontin called him a "chuckling maniac" running a "terrible company." Oops! Amazon.com survived and thrived while hundreds of other online retailers perished. Every profile writer since then has felt obligated to trot out a tired line about Bezos "getting the last laugh."

Yet that misunderstands Bezos. The laugh is part of his schtick. He's having fun! He's got a surprise! Where Apple CEO Steve Jobs wooed audiences with imperious cool, Bezos plays it loose and goofy. (Like the time he bragged about having sex at a commencement speech.) Just when you think you've got him figured out, he changes his story. It goes something like this:

You thought Amazon.com was a bookstore. No, wait, it's a retailer, the Wal-Mart of the Web. It's a bricks-and-mortar play, with superefficient real-world warehouses. No, it's a software maker whose Web services underpin the likes of Twitter and SmugMug. Oh, never mind — now it's all about the Kindle, which is clearly the iPod of the book world!

By shifting Amazon.com's focus, Bezos gets Wall Street to think about Amazon.com's starry potential rather than the grinding reality of its workaday business, which is a low-margin, highly competitive retail business. Bezos would never get on the Daily Show to talk about Amazon's latest discount electronics offers. That's the real joke here. And that's why Bezos is really laughing.

(Video by Ryan Tate)

They say Amazon executives told them "high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable." Writes one of the McAdams Wright Ragen analysts: "[Amazon execs] told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by company. Since we've never seen a Kindle in person, we're inclined to believe the Amazon executives when they say the Kindle isn't quite such a huge hit. But the suits might also be trying to keep expectations low enough to be easily surpassed.

A report from TechCrunch, which pegged Kindle sales so far this year at 240,000. "We acknowledge being 'out-sourced' by TechCrunch," Mahaney writes it his note, "But we believe the 240K number was well-sourced and believe reports of 40,000 shipments a month may also be reasonable."

The representatives declined to discuss sales numbers of the Kindle, only saying that it's generally first or second on the list of best selling items in the retailer's electronics category. And there was no information about demographics — a critical piece of data to book marketers, where the sheer number and breadth of subject matter in published titles, combined with limited marketing budgets, mean that niche audience appeals are critical.

Publishers receive 35 percent of the list price they set for titles per sale. However, larger publishers who move lots of physical units can probably negotiate better deals, and even get physical books converted to e-book format for free. But the Amazonians declined to comment on specifics due to antitrust concerns — belying their role as price-setter for the entire publishing market in print and otherwise.

Later, I dropped by the Amazon booth to see the Kindle in the wild. There were maybe three or four units on display, each closely held by a spokesperson. Visitors weren't even allowed to handle one of the devices for themselves, presumably for fear they'd walk away with one.

But giving them away might have been a smart move. Nothing sells the Kindle like the Kindle, not even the price cut to $359 from $399 that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touted in his speech Friday. A three-figure price point simply won't get the devices into the hands of readers fast enough to make the market for content worthwhile for publishers anytime soon.

• On former White House spokesmonkey Scott McClellan's new book, which won't be back in physical stock until June 9 but is still available on the Kindle for $9.99: "One of the great things about electronic books — they don't go out of stock."
• Regarding reading on a laptop, Bezos asserted, "You certainly can't curl up in bed with one." Actually, our laptop has been our most faithful sleeping partner in years.
• Playing up the Kindle's ability to look up definitions on the fly. "I have discovered my vocabulary is not nearly as good as I thought it was ... I was living in a nice fantasy world where my contextual guesses were accurate."
• Of the 125,000 titles available as both physical books and Kindle e-books, six percent of the sales go to Kindle. Some, including Bezos, buy both a physical copy and an electronic copy — presumably because a Kindle full of books doesn't telegraph just how smart you are.
• Anderson asked by what factor the number of titles available on Kindle would grow by next year in Bezos estimation. "I wouldn't be happy with 20 million. I'm hard to make happy. Bwahahahaha!" (Bezos' laugh is surprisingly deep and loud for such a small man).
• Like Amazon's offering of used copies alongside new copies, it didn't change the amount of original sales, only expanded, suggesting it's not a zero-sum game. "Most people bought as many books as they previously bought, and plus they buy Kindle books."
• Explaining Amazon's strategy of only offering print-on-demand titles printed through BookSurge in its shipping discounts, he said it's because it's cheaper to pack multiple purchases in one box — hence POD books must be printed at Amazon fulfillment centers to qualify.
• Early in the discussion with Bezos, Anderson kept turning the conversation towards his"long tail" theory. Eventually, Bezos caught on, expounding on how Amazon's whole business model was based on niche content availability being a differentiator — shrewdly buttering up Anderson while subtly claiming credit for the idea.

Whether you want to meet at your local coffee shop, a public park, or your favorite watering hole is up to you. We hope you enjoy meeting your fellow Kindlers.