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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the continuing popularity of Apple's App store, question the longevity of AIR apps, investigate the waves of changes happening in the book publishing industry, review one 19 year old's innovative and successful news website, tell you about a new trend to track called 'Cross Reality,' report on the latest news about Microsoft's Web-based office initiatives, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Earlier today, Apple announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded over 1.5 billion applications. According to Apple, there are now also over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program and over 65,000 apps in the store. The number of actual iPhone developers might be a bit lower than Apple reports, as a lot of people only joined the paid version of the program to get their hands on the betas of the iPhone 3.0 OS, but there can be little doubt that the App store is a runaway success, both for Apple and developers. Given this huge success of the App Store, it is worth thinking about the factors that contributed to the App Store's success and what Apple could do to make the store even better.

If you've been looking for a reason to jailbreak your iPhone, look no further. Yesterday, iPhone developer Alec Renolds announced on multiple online forums that his long-awaited BitTorrent-powered application called "appDowner" is about to be released. When he first announced this project last year, the idea was to create a simple BitTorrent client for the iPhone. Unfortunately, personal issues got in the way of development and the project was put on hold for months on end.

But now, Renolds has returned and this time he's expanded on the original concept to create what appears to be a full-on App Store replacement application.

If you're wondering where all the Push Notification-enabled iPhone apps are, you're not alone. Many of the most highly anticipated applications designed to work in iPhone's OS 3.0 have not yet had their updated versions approved. On the list of overdue apps are AIM, IM+, Beejive IM, and ESPN ScoreCenter to name a few. And who knows how many lesser-known and brand-new applications are still sitting in limbo!

So what's the reason for the delay? One iPhone application developer has his suspicions. He's discovered what appears to be an issue with Apple's Feedback service and is now questioning if this, and not the backlog of new app approvals, is what's causing the holdup.

It's no surprise that people spend their weekends goofing off, relaxing, and entertaining themselves, but our weekly downtime activities also have major implications for mobile application marketing, as it turns out. According to new data from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, consumers are over 30% more likely to download an application over the weekend than during the week.

3Tera, a California-based cloud computing company, today announced the upcoming launch of their AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where users can find production-ready, scalable components on a free, trial, or pay-per-use basis.

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.