Yes, people. You're looking at the first shots of Amazon's Kindle 2. The follow-up to their popular e-book reader. Our ninja sent us a ton of shots, and we have to admit, they look pretty good. The unit didn't go down too much in size which is unfortunate, but then again, you want something pretty large so it's comfortable to read on. He says that the unit is a little wider and a little longer, but it should help those that thought the first unit was a little too awkwardly-shaped. What's even better is that with the new unit, while holding it, you won't accidentally flip the page like the old one.

As far as buttons go, on the right side, the bottoms from top to bottom are: Home, Next Page, Menu, a joystick, and Undo. On the left side, there's Previous, Page, and Next Page. We're told the buttons are significantly smaller to avoid accidental page turning. The joystick takes the place of the scroll wheel and it "takes a little getting used to." As far as the redesigned keyboard... it "has a good layout, but lettering on the keys could be darker." Continuing our tour around the unit, next to the sliding sleep button, there's the headphone jack, and on the right side edge you’ve got the volume up/down buttons. What's interesting (and you can see this in the photos) is that the backside of the unit is mostly metal with the speakers at the bottom pf the back. One more plus? They've finally ditched their own charger. The Kindle 2 is able to be charged with a miniUSB cable.

Amazon and the publisher Grove/Atlantic will give away the electronic download of a new novel, Spirit House, by Christopher G. Moore, to Amazon Kindle customers beginning Friday, in advance of the book's release in print on Aug. 28, the companies announced on Wednesday. Morgan Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said in a statement that the deal with Amazon "is a great way to expand Moore's audience even further." The Kindle, a portable electronic reader that downloads books, newspapers, blogs and magazines, sells on Amazon.com for $359.

[I]ts Reader Digital Book will be able to read electronic books published using the .epub format that many of the largest book publishers are using. Until now, Sony's e-book reader could only read books available from the Sony e-book store, PDF documents, and DRM-free text. Starting next month, the new PRS-505 Sony Reader model will be able to access secure DRM- and non-DRM-protected content in the .epub format, formerly called the Open eBook format.

The Sony Reader Digital Book is the first e-book reading device to support the .epub format, which is the XML-based standard format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It allows publishers to convert books to different formats, protect the copy using DRM (digital rights management) and has the ability to resize PDF e-books and other text to better fit the reader's screen size.

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"This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party eBook stores, Web sites, and even public libraries," Steve Haber, senior vice president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics, said in a statement.

The announcement is the latest move in a standards war over e-book formats pitting Sony against Amazon. Amazon's Kindle e-book reader and e-books it sells support the proprietary .azw format. Amazon also acquired Mobipocket, which offers a format for texts read on PDAs and BlackBerrys and its Kindle can read DRM-free .mobi files.

It's a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books. How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won't last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors' other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it's good enough for me.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won't work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.

But they'll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we'll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Publishing officials are reluctant to discuss sales figures, but say that they have seen double digit increases in ebook sales since the Kindle's release, and renewed interest in downloads for the Sony Reader. Sales for the most popular ebooks are in the hundreds, comparable to the number for the Reader, which came out in 2006.

"The Kindle has increased awareness. Publishers have told me that in some cases the Sony numbers were double or triple what they had been," says Michael Smith, head of the International Digital Publishing Forum, which tracks ebook sales. Selling through Amazon.com for $399 (£199), the Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 0.29 kg. It can hold some 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary.

The Kindle has been praised for the selection of texts available -- more than 100,000 books, blogs and newspapers -- and for the speed of delivery, which averages less than a minute. Fans include authors such as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis and Neil Gaiman.

Over the summer, Winter will make 47 posts on the popular social networking site about his upcoming novel "The Architects Are Here." Winter's publisher Penguin is touting the initiative as the first-ever Facebook novel serialization. Each post will feature a 300-word "distillation of a chapter's essence" as well as "commentary, notes and musings," Penguin said in a release.

In addition, each installment will include videos and photos of the people and places that inspired the novel's characters and setting. The project, which will run for 10 weeks, begins Tuesday. "The Architects Are Here" is set for publication in September. Winter was a juror last year for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is also the author of the novel "The Big Why" published in 2004.

Here are Penguin's instructions to access the posts: "Users are encouraged to contact Michael via The Wall at Penguin's Facebook page with a friend request, at which point they will be added to the distribution list." Penguin says if users have trouble accessing the page, they can sign into their Facebook account, then cut and paste this link into their browser's address window: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid2255490973.

In the past week, about 10,000 people have read the first line of a new novella called "Ghost Town," about a homeless teenager: "'U always come out of nowhere,' Brad the quarterback laughed." So begins a story that's being dubbed a "text novella." Wireless company Virgin Mobile is beaming it to the cellphones of users who sign up, sending the story in 160-character installments through two text messages a day for five weeks. Mobile companies have been racing to capitalize on the entertainment capabilities of new cellphone models in recent months, offering mini-TV shows, video streams of live concerts and even short films for cellphones. Text-message fiction is a new twist on this genre.

This story isn't written by a published author, however; it was penned by a copywriter working for Virgin and staffers from YouthNoise, a nonprofit San Francisco-based Web site for socially conscious teens. Aimed at raising awareness of teenage homelessness, the novella is a project of Re*Generation, a nonprofit group operated by Virgin that works to help homeless teenagers. If the novella succeeds, Virgin says, it may commission more text stories.

Virgin says the initiative is a way to help charity while reaching the coveted teen demographic. "It's exactly our target market," says Ariel Rosen, Virgin's director of pro-social initiatives. Linda Barrabee, a wireless analyst with Boston's Yankee Group, says 61% of 13- to 17-year-olds send messages at least once a month, compared with 27% of people over 18.

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Marco Johnson, a 17-year-old from Bryans Road, Md., who signed up for the novella, says he finds the story "sort of depressing," but likes receiving the narrative through text messages. "I know some people will say it's a waste of texts," Mr. Johnson says. "But they're on the five-cent plan and I'm on the text bucket -- 200 messages for $4.99."

[T]he vice president for legal and government affairs for the Association of American Publishers sits in the trade association's offices at the foot of Capitol Hill, shaking his head at what he sees as the breathtaking arrogance of it all. "In order to provide online searchability," Adler says, Google has to create "a proprietary database that in essence would be the world's largest digital library." Extremely impressive, way cool -- and clearly of enormous value, or the company wouldn't be spending so much to do it. From New York, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken echoes Adler's incredulity. "It's an attempt to avoid licensing," Aiken says. "Without the ability to say no, a rights holder really has nothing to license." All together now: What part of "we own the copyright" doesn't Google understand?

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Listen long enough to both sides in this dispute and your head will spin with legal citations and passionate argument. But it's possible to isolate key points of contention. Among them:

Copyright and fair use: As Google's Gerber puts it, the two sides obviously have a "fundamental difference about what is required to build an index of information." Because whole books or even whole pages are not displayed, Gerber and his colleagues argue, making copyrighted books searchable is the kind of "transformative use" permitted under copyright law. The publishers and the Authors Guild completely disagree, arguing that Google's unlicensed creation and retention of digital copies -- as well as its creation of additional copies for the libraries -- are illegal.

Money and motivation: "Google would like the world to see this as a purely altruistic act on its part," says the AAP's Adler. Instead, he argues, searchable books are part of the company's "very brilliant economic strategy" for differentiating itself from competitive search engines. If you're worried that Yahoo, Microsoft or some unknown startup will scoop up lucrative market share, adding books to your database helps you stay ahead.

Google executives downplay this analysis but don't deny it. "The reason we're doing it," Wojcicki says, is that "making Google more comprehensive will yield a better search experience." Yes, that should lead -- eventually -- to more users and more revenue. But Book Search, she cautions, also represents a huge outlay of capital and isn't guaranteed to pay off anytime soon. It's a risk, as Gerber points out, you don't see publishers lining up to take.

The Web search analogy: This gets a bit complicated, but it's crucial to understanding the dispute over Google's library scanning. Wojcicki, Smith, Gerber and Google attorney Alexander Macgillivray -- whom Smith calls "our thought leader" on intellectual property issues -- all insist that there's very little difference between the basic functioning of their Web search engine and Book Search.

"We are extremely excited to publish original content written by such a prominent author, available exclusively as an e-book," said Ana Maria Allessi, publisher of HarperMedia. "HarperMedia publishes approximately 350 titles per year, and Julie Quinn is a key player in this program. She is one of our top five best- selling e-book authors, and we expect that these original e-books will attract even more fans."

With the advent of the dedicated reader the e-book industry is on the verge of explosive growth, and Avon Books publisher Liate Stehlik believes that romance readers will be at the forefront. "The New York Times recently reported that female readers now compose one of the fastest-growing markets for digital books, noting their voracious reading appetite -- booksellers have told us that it's not uncommon for avid romance fans to buy upwards of five books each month," said Stehlik. "Julia Quinn is one of Avon's most popular authors, with four million copies of her books in print. These original e-book epilogues, of two of her most popular books, provide a perfect lead-in to the publication of On the Way to the Wedding, the final installment in her beloved Bridgerton series."

"After countless requests from readers, I decided to try something a little bit different," notes bestselling author Julia Quinn. "I'm thrilled to serve up The Bridgerton 2nd Epilogues -- the story after the story, in this unique book format. I think romance fans are going to be very excited."