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We all love to flip through a glossy, interesting magazine on the plane, in the dentist's waiting room, or stretched out on the sofa in the evening. However magazines have not been isolated from the troubles that print media are having due to the online world. Many magazines are struggling to survive and some of them are moving completely online in order to stick around. In November we reported that leading tech magazine PC Magazine would go 100% online from February 2009, after 27 years of existing in print form. Let's look at how PC Magazine is doing, along with another digital magazine that we like called Avantoure.

According to a new report from Forrester, the eBook and eReader market has now hit a point where it is ready to break out of its niche and become a mainstream phenomenon. In the report, Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps argues that while early readers like the Rocket eBook in 1998 and the Sony Librié in 2004 failed to garner a large enough audience, today's consumers have embraced mobile, on-the-go media consumption thanks to the prevalence of MP3 players and handheld video games. Thanks to this, consumers are now also more likely to buy electronic goods than ever before.

According to a report in the New York Times this morning, Google is getting ready to enter the eBook market by providing publishers with an infrastructure for direct-to-consumer sales. The Times reports that Google discussed this initiative with publishers at last weekend's BookExpo in New York. According to the times, Google is mostly interested in creating an architecture that would enable publishers to do direct-to-consumer sales (with the checkout handled by Google Checkout, we assume). But there is also no reason to believe that this initiative could not include some kind of electronic store, maybe on top of Google's controversial Google Books service.

During an event in New York City this morning, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, unveiled a larger version of the company's successful Kindle eBook reader. The new device, the Kindle DX, has a 9.7" display that is about two and a half times larger than that of the Kindle 2. The Kindle DX will come with a built-in PDF reader, and features an auto-rotate mode, so that readers can easily switch between reading in portrait and landscape modes. The Kindle DX will cost $489 and is scheduled to ship this summer.

We speculated about this yesterday, and by now, it looks like a given that Amazon will release a larger version of its Kindle eBook reader tomorrow that will focus on the college textbook market. While the exact hardware specs are not quite clear yet, it does seem logical that Amazon would like to push its eBook reader into this market segment. After all, according to some estimates, the textbook market is worth almost $9 billion dollars in the U.S. alone. We do wonder, however, if students will really like this idea. After all, virtually every student already owns a portable device with a nice screen for reading eTextbooks: their laptops.

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, a popular eBook reader for the iPhone, just announced that it has been acquired by Amazon. Amazon, of course, also just released Kindle for iPhone, which is now one of the most popular mobile eBook readers. According to Lexcycle, the company does not plan to make any changes to the Stanza app or user experience because of this acquisition, and Lexcycle will continue its relationships with its content partners. Neither Stanza nor Amazon disclosed the price of the acquisition.

Adobe and Lexcycle, the company behind the popular Stanza eBook application, announced today that they are working together with the Internet Archive on turning the Stanza online catalog system into an open standard for distributing free and commercial eBooks. This new standard, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), will be built on top of Atom, and aims to create an open standard for distributed online catalogs for electronic books.

Amazon just released a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch (iTunes link) that allows users to download and read any eBook from Amazon's Kindle store on Apple's popular mobile devices. This move comes just a few days after Amazon's Kindle 2 eBook reader arrived in users' hands, but according to Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president, Amazon does not expect that this app will cannibalize Kindle sales as users will probably only use their phones to read for short periods.

A few weeks ago, just after the introduction of the new Kindle 2, the Authors Guild complained that Amazon's eBook reader had a text-to-speech function. According to Paul Aitken, the Guild's executive director, this meant that Amazon would have to pay for audio rights for every book downloaded onto the device. Today, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild's president, echoed this sentiment in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

It is only Tuesday, but it has already been a good week for eBook fans. Yesterday, Amazon released the newest version of its Kindle eBook reader, and today, O'Reilly announced that it will now host Bookworm, a popular open source eBook reader and management system, as part of its O'Reilly Labs. O'Reilly wants to position Bookworm, which is built on open standards and frameworks, as an alternative to proprietary eBook management and reading systems like Adobe's Digital Editions and Sony's eBook Library Software.