How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

This is a first for the publishing industry, who are following in the footsteps of Hollywood. Most famously, tens of thousands of users who used BitTorrent to download the widely-acclaimed and award-winning film The Hurt Locker were sued by the film's producers. Many of those defendants settled out of court, as is common in cases like these.

Despite the popularity of legitimate e-book marketplaces like Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks, digital book piracy has grown in recent years, with some best-sellers being illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

It remains to be seen how this case unfolds, or if other book publishers follow Wiley in the practice of suing BitTorrent users for copyright infringement.

Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.

There's no mention on the site of whether the books will be DRM-free or not, but I sure hope so. (Update: Blurb lead engineer for digital books Michael Murray tells us the ebooks are 100% DRM free.) The company says it will be making a more detailed announcement about the new eBook program soon. All the example eBooks in the announcement are letterboxed on horizontal view, too. That doesn't seem ideal to me.

You should post titles of your awesome Blurb eBooks in comments below, and if you're selling them for $2.00, I'll go buy some of them. Heck, price them at $4 and I'll buy a couple a month. Easy and cheap publishing for a widely used and attractive consumption platform sounds like a beautiful thing.

The result is a Kindle-style e-book with music and sound effects that play in the background as you read. The books are sold as stand-alone mobile applications, currently for iOS with Android support reportedly underway.

When we downloaded Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band for iPad and started reading, scene-appropriate, cinematic-sounding music began playing. A few paragraphs in, we could hear the crackle of a fireplace and later, creaking doors and footsteps. Some of the sound effects were slightly distracting, but just subtle enough that they didn't interrupt our reading.

What makes this approach interesting is the underlying technology, which syncs the changes in sound with your reading speed, which is something the application learns as you go. Some readers might find the tiny triangular icon sliding down the margin of the page as you go distracting. For others, it may be akin to using one's finger as a pacer while reading a book.

For some people, this more immersive reading experience might be the perfect antidote to endless digital distractions, allowing for more sustained focus on reading long-form material.

The product has been met with mixed reactions. Some are open to the possibility that this may be part of the future of books, while others, like Wired's Charlie Sorrel, find the experience to be distracting and unnecessary.

Do you think books with soundtracks are the future of reading or a ridiculous gimmick? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.

Kindle Profiles comes in both private and public flavors. The private one, as you'd expect, has much more in it. But as Facebook has done over the past couple of years with its initially private service, over time Amazon will likely prompt and tease you to make your private content public.

Kindle Profiles isn't even the official name for this service. In its inimitably clumsy branding way, Amazon calls it "Kindle.amazon.com." The service aims to augment the reading experience by "bringing readers together and by helping them to learn more from the books that they read." In other words: it's social. You can follow people "to see their Public Notes and reading activities, and review your books, highlights, and notes."

The private profile lists out your Kindle booklist, which it gets from your Amazon profile (both purchased books and ones on your Wish List). Each book has a reading status and rating, which is populated from your Amazon profile if available.

How Your Kindle Profile Differs From Your Amazon Profile

At a high level, your Kindle Profile is focused on reading and your Amazon profile is focused on buying. Specifically, there are two main differences between your Kindle Profile and your Amazon Profile.

Firstly, Kindle Profile makes available your Kindle highlights and notes. Highlights are passages in a book that you literally highlight for later viewing. Notes are your own custom notations inside a book, much like scribbling in the margins of a paper book. Both highlights and notes are private by default, but you can make them public on a book-by-book basis.

Secondly, you can connect your Kindle Profile to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. As noted above, this causes the system to auto-follow users in your social networks who have a Kindle Profile, too. You can also manually follow users - here is my public profile if you're interested.

There is an option to auto-share your reading activity to Twitter or Facebook. Again the default is private, but Amazon puts the public option front and center. This only applies to the status of a public book, so it doesn't apply to books marked private or to Kindle highlights and notes.

Your private Kindle Profile comes in a handy 'homepage' like package, offering features such as a "Daily Review" (selected highlights from your reading), recent activity, popular highlights, stats and "highly followed people" (featuring the usual social media suspects, e.g. Kevin Rose and Seth Godin).

Will You Use Kindle Profiles?

One issue I had when playing with my Kindle Profile was that much of my data was out-of-date. Goodreads is my social reading service of choice and there is significantly more of my reading data in Goodreads than on my Amazon profile. There appears to be no way to sync the two. Since I don't feel inclined to keep two separate social reading services up-to-date, it's likely that I'll stick with Goodreads - since I enjoy that community and I have over three years worth of reading data there.

Overall, it's great to see Amazon making Kindle profiles social. Granted, it's far from perfect. The interface is a bit confusing, especially the different private and public profiles. There is also a lot more social connectivity that Amazon could enable, for example allowing you to send highlights automatically from your Kindle to Twitter, Facebook or even Google Plus.

However, the interface and additional social features will evolve over time. This is a good start by Amazon. Now the big question is: will you use it? As noted above, I'm inclined to stick with Goodreads for now. You?

There's a whole lot more to the story than that, though. Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac. Now he's at Facebook. It's a big deal.

This isn't the first time that Mike Matas has been hired through acquisition, either. In 2005, Apple acquired his startup hired him away from his startup Delicious Monster. He was 19 years old at the time. That company built a media organizing tool called Delicious Library. Update: Turns out I was wrong about that. Apple just hired Matas. That doesn't sound very good. Maybe everybody's getting paid and it's OK though, I don't know.

Delicious Library is now the books on a shelf interface Apple uses to display media in iTunes, iBooks and other apps. (Asked today if Facebook had been calling him, Wil Shipley, Matas's co-founder at Delicious Library, said on Twitter "Nope! Always a bridesmaid.")

While acting as a Human Interface Designer at Apple for the four years, three of which were before the iPhone's launch, Matas worked extensively on the secret world-changing phone.

Matas designed the camera, photos, maps, settings and battery display for the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't ship with very many apps and Matas designed at least four of them. He also designed the Photos app for the iPad. He designed Time Machine and Photo Booth for the Mac. He's not Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guy at the very top, but he's pretty high profile none the less.

And now he's at Facebook.

A Detour Through the Super-Stealth

Oddly, Mike Matas appeared set to engage in a different kind of experiment just a few weeks ago. While still winning accolades for the e-book platform he co-founded, Matas's name showed up in reports about a stealthy new startup called Nest Labs.

According to a report by Green Tech Media's widely respected writer Michael Kanellos, Matas was working with Nest on a home networked climate control system. What were they making? Presumably one hell of a compelling interface for getting people to minimize their home power consumption, designed to be as pleasing to use as an iPhone.

Several Apple designers were in on the product; I saw tonight that Tom Crabtree, former Apple Art Designer who created the first iPhone packaging lists Nest as a client as well.

Kanellos sees some clues and takes a guess that Nest may have taken money from the Venture Capital firm Al Gore is a part of, the venerable Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Early backers of Google, Amazon, etc.

Nest.com is a pretty mysterious website for the company, too. There's nothing there but a very bold and ambiguous quote from investor Bill Prescott ;apparently Google has never indexed any inbound links to it.

None of this discussion even addresses the apparently TED-wowing e-book platform that Matas built for Push Pop Press. Facebook says it's not going into that business but will incorporate some of the company's work. Look out Twitter, look out Google Plus, Facebook is going to go Apple design on you. Matas is far from the only rock star designer Facebook has scooped up lately, either.

So the mysterious young designer who designed much of the interface for the most-loved mobile device in history, then began to work on transforming reading into an act befitting the future, then began working on making personal environmental responsibilities like turning off the lights in your house fun...is now at Facebook.

That sounds like the beginning of something very interesting. Some people say the Web suffers from social network overload already. More likely, I suspect, the world of social networking is just beginning to emerge. It's going to get a whole lot better, too.

The social networking giant assures us it's not getting into the e-book publishing business, but rather snatched up the startup so that it can allow "some of the technology, ideas and inspiration behind Push Pop Press to become part of how millions of people connect and share with each other on Facebook."

In acquiring the company, Facebook gets its hands on design and engineering talent, as well as the technology underlying the Push Pop Press e-book service, which Facebook will presumably incorporate into its own tablet apps and other products moving forward.

Like this one, many of Facebook's acquisitions have been made in order to acquire talent and technology. The company acquired Hot Potato in 2010 and quickly moved to incorporate the underlying technology into what would later become Facebook Places. The previous year's acquisition of Friendfeed was made largely for its talent, leaving the product itself to languish and fade away.

The Push Pop team will cease publishing e-books, but Our Choice will continue to be sold and its profits will be donated to a climate change advocacy nonprofit.

It's a fascinating experiment in eating your own dog food but it's not without historical precedent. Many novels throughout time were sold by subscription (Dickens, for example) and Samuel Johnson once took nine years to write the Western world's first authoritative printed dictionary. It was supported by subscription along the way and the end product weighed 20 pounds. That project was initiated by the publishing industry in response to massive disruption caused by the proliferation of printed materials and a need for a reference book defining common words. Perhaps this period of technological disruption will be well suited for another experiment in a similar format.

Another Way to Do It

When lean startup guru Eric Ries went to market this month with his new book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, he decided to use a traditional print publishing strategy (with Crown Business as publisher), in order to gain maximum promotional support and distribution.

Ries used his widely-read blog and social media presence to build a community of supporters before any part of the book was available - then asked that the members of that community pre-order the book as soon as that was possible on Amazon. The book itself won't be available for two more months - but it's hot on the Amazon charts already. It hit #7 in the best-seller ranks just hours after the pre-order call to action was issued on Ries's blog.

Is that a case of straddling the future and the past? Which kind of strategy do you think will work best in the future, Ries's or Sattersten's?
"This project is much more than just a typical ebook," writes O'Reilly's Joe Wikert. "It's actually a collection of publishing experiments packaged as an ebook."

"The primary case I am making is that we need to bring entrepreneurship back to book publishing," Sattersten the author explains. "We need more experiments. We need to learn from the world of startups."

Sattersen was interviewed yesterday by Jenn Webb on O'Reilly Radar. "Your personal definition for a 'book' can limit your opportunities as well," he said. "If you limit that definition to, say, 224 pages of paper in a 6-inch-by-9-inch trim size, you just made your world a pretty small one."

The experiment speaks to the future but clearly to the past as well, in several ways. "This was the dream of every would-be writer/publisher in the 80s and 90s," says Curt Hopkins, ReadWriteWeb's most experienced and diverse writer on staff, "but the tech for it didn't exist."

The 18th century's Samuel Johnson was well-known and patronized by a handful of that time's most powerful media interests. "Now, a would-be publisher could run a Kickstarter campaign and lay funnels out to a dozen social media properties," says Hopkins. "It still probably wouldn't work, but there is a chance it would, and the whole thing would take an afternoon to completely set up."

The goal of Starkey's app -- Kings and Queens -- is to bring his book, and history, to life. If you are familiar with the history of the British monarchy, it is one of the most fascinating tales of intrigue, betrayal, politics and power in the history of the world. The topic was begging to be brought to interactive life. Starkey's app is not just a splendid way to blend documentary and books but could signal the future of literature by looking into the past.

Starkey told The Guardian that the app, created by Trade Mobile, "reflects the creative processes of a writer." It gives him the ability to take certain aspects of history and his writing and give them digital life, as opposed to leaving them on the cutting room floor if he were making a documentary.

"All those things you've had to level out to make the line of narrative ... you can put back in," Starkey told the Guardian. "I no longer have to take these decisions that involve sacrifice. The reader can arrive at the judgement for themselves."

Kings and Queens is interactive history at its best. It provides timelines, family trees and lineage and the themes that have emerged in tracking 2,000 years of British royalty. Starkey provides audio and video of the abridged text of his book. Oh, there is also feature footage of the most recent royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton (if you are into that kind of thing).

Pick up a book like James Joyce's Ulysses and you'll likely want a library at your side to help define, translate and help give the context needed to understand the plethora of heady content inside. Before the days of the Internet, reading some of the more scholarly literary texts involved just that - having a dictionary or other reference materials on hand.

Now, Google has brought these things together by adding search, translation and word definitions directly to its Google eBooks offering.

Google does this, of course, using its in-house tools, such as Google Dictionary, Google Translate and its flagship Google Search technology. Readers can also search for the word or phrase not only in the text, but in Google and Wikipedia. When looking for a word definition, readers are presented not only with a basic definition, but the ability to hear the word pronunciation.

It's great what turning printed words into digital representations means for the reader experience, isn't it? Instead of flipping through a dictionary, all you need to do now is right click on a word and a world of context and information is immediately available.

In February, Apple announced a new subscription service for all publishers of content-based apps. This system took a 30% cut of subscription fees for Apple. The announcement had bloggers, publishers and mainstream media alike calling Apple everything from greedy to anti-competitive and wondering what effect it would have on subscription reliant apps.

For iFlow Reader, that effect has been to remove any profit margin the company had. The company has announced that it will be shutting down by the end of the month and that, in no uncertain terms, it is all because of Apple.

It goes on to explain that their gross margin on ebooks is less than the 30% that Apple now charges because of the "agency model" adopted by the largest publishers, which sets a fixed price for all ebooks across all sellers and cuts commissions down to 30%.

"The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some," they write.

The company doesn't mix words in who is to blame in this situation, writing that "We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us."

While some reactions were ambivalent on whether or not Apple's policy was prudent, the iFlow Reader team paints a bleak picture for small retailers involved in ebook sales.

"Our philosophy is simple," explained Apple CEO Steve Jobs upon announcing the rule changes, "when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app."

The iFlow Reader team sees it quite differently, writing "We were rapidly adding books to our catalog and we had plans to add many, many more by adding PDF support to the iFlowReader along with many other exciting features. We were also in the middle of discussions with OEM customers in many countries who wanted to license our technology in countries around the world. We had investors ready to invest money in our future. It was the American dream that we all strive for. Sadly, the America that we thought we were working in turned out to be a totalitarian regime and the dictator decided that he wanted all of what we had. Our dream is now over."

It is a big step for Android tablets as the nascent Honeycomb application ecosystem becomes fleshed out by developers. Kindle is one of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android devices and Amazon's "buy once, read everywhere" strategy is one of the most unique programs in the e-publishing space.

"We've taken all the features customers love about Kindle for Android, and created a beautiful new user interface and a seamless shopping experience tailored to the look and feel of Honeycomb tablets," said Dorothy Nicholls, director of Kindle at Amazon in a press release.

Is this one of the first tangible steps from Amazon to launching its own Android tablet, as is rumored for later this summer? It was just a matter of time before Amazon came out with a Kindle app for Honeycomb as the company's strategy is to be as ubiquitous as possible, developing for all platforms.

So far there has not been much traction in the Android tablet market or really any tablet market that is not an iPad. Yet, as more Android tablets become available as the year goes along the Honeycomb application ecosystem will continue to grow. Kindle for Honeycomb is one of the first salvos in what will probably be a holiday-season showdown between the iPad and Android tablets.

Google finished off 2010 with the long-awaited launch of its e-book marketplace, "Google eBookstore". Beyond Google's already 6 million strong library of titles, its device-agnostic approach was seen by many in the industry as a threat to other, more solidified players in the industry, such as Amazon and its Kindle e-reader. Now, it looks like Google may be working to further its support of multiple devices with the acquisition of eBook Technologies.

The statement echoes the one on the company's homepage, which announces the acquisition and says that "Working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices."

Google supports a number of devices, from Android and iOS smartphones to any e-book reader that supports the Adobe e-book platform to any device with a Javascript-enabled browser. As the Consumer Electronics Show pointed out to everyone paying attention last week, though, there is an onslaught of tablets, superphones and other mobile devices on the horizon. Could this acquisition have to do with this explosion of devices? Or, as TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid suggests, could it have to do with the "distribution technology" referred to on the company's site?

A key feature of the eBook platform and, a breakthrough for both avid readers and professional customers, is the ability to purchase and/or access reading materials anywhere and at any time. Instantaneous access to content is enabled through a built-in modem, USB, or Ethernet connection on the eBook device. Once connected to the ETI eBook Network via the Internet, customers can browse, select, access and optionally purchase eBook content from an eBookstore.

We reached out to Google for comment on the situation, asking how the slew of new devices changes Google's plans for approaching e-books, but received the same comment. Got a better guess?

Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the predictions, the more risk of them not coming true! Without further ado, here are my predictions for 2011 - 5 serious and 1 not so serious.

2: eBooks will hit 20% market penetration by the end of 2011. In 2010, the Association of American Publishers reported that eBooks made up 9.03% of total consumer book sales - compared to 3.31% at the close of 2009. I'm predicting this growth to rocket in 2011, thanks to a plentiful supply of cheap eReaders and a long overdue price war on eBooks between Amazon, Barnes&Noble and others. I predict it will reach 20%, in other words one in five books in 2011 will be sold as an eBook. If that bold prediction comes true, it will be great news for book consumers and will silence eBook skeptics about the future of eBooks. Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting paper books will go away, just that eBooks become much more popular and utilized.

3: Internet of Cars will be the surprise hit of the year. This year we saw further commercialization of services that connect everyday objects to the Internet. In 2011, I predict that cars (not smart homes, smart grids, etc.) will be where the most innovation and mainstream attention happens for Internet of Things technologies. Apps like AutoBot will gain traction over 2011.

4: Internet TV tips and gets huge consumer uptake. In 2010 there was a lot of progress in this sector: Apple TV re-design, Google TV, Boxee, Roku, Clicker and other developments. Most of this activity was largely experimental though, in that no one vendor got the formula quite right. For example, the launch problems of Google TV at the end of this year. However in 2011, consumers will flock to these products as they mature and more Internet TV content is made available - particularly in the U.S. market, but hopefully to international markets too.

Picking a breakout product is difficult, as each of the main players offers something different. I don't think there will be a breakout product, although Google has the broadest capabilities and so it has the potential to become one if it gets the product right. I predict that Google won't dominate this market though; and neither will Apple.

5: A major pop music star will do something amazing with web technologies, that blows open the online music scene. Arcade Fire set the scene in 2010, with their experimental collaboration with Google on an HTML5-fueled interactive video. In 2011, I expect an even bigger star - someone innovative like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, or a totally new star - to do something that re-defines what music means online. That could be something new in a live show, a music video, or something completely unexpected. To get more specific, I'll bet on something that blends a live album with internet technologies - which sells unexpectedly well and thus sets a trend in the music industry.

6: Bonus prediction: by the end of 2011, the most viewed YouTube video of all time will no longer be Justin Bieber. Instead it will be a collaboration between an unknown comedian and a breakout new baby. I'm envisaging a combination of comedy tap dancing and baby giggling (perhaps recorded using an auto-tune device). Yes, 2011 will mark the return of viral comedy and laughing babies to the top of the YouTube charts - this time as a duet!

So how many is that? "Millions," says Amazon. More than the reported 7.5 million iPads reported back in October? More than the estimated 13.8 million iPads forecasted to ship by year-end?

According to Amazon (well, the details it would release, that is), more people activated Kindles and downloaded Kindle books and apps on Christmas Day than on any other day in history. The Kindle Wi-Fi and Kindle 3G were Amazon's best-selling products this holiday season (Nov. 14 though Dec. 19, based on units ordered) in its Electronics category, followed by the iPod Touch 8 GB.

Says Amazon, the Kindle is popular because of its low $139 price point, its e-ink technology for reading e-books outside in direct sunlight, its lighter weight and long-lasting battery life, among other things.

But these "figures" from Amazon aren't saying much - they're just getting it press (guilty). So it sold more than a hugely popular book released nearly three years ago? So a product made by Amazon and heavily promoted on its website is a top-seller?

So?

But Analysts Will...

Without hard numbers, it's hard to know where the Kindle stands now in terms of its competition.

Analysts have a few guesses, though. According to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg this month, Amazon is likely to sell more than 8 million Kindles this year, which is at least 60% more than previously predicted. (Citigroup, Barclays Capital, BGC Partners LP and ThinkEquity LLC had previously estimated Amazon would sell about 5 million Kindles this year. Caris & Co. predicted 4.8 million, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. projected 4 million to 5 million.)

We do know that Amazon likes to take every opportunity to tout the Kindle's success. For example, in October, a day prior to the reveal of the Barnes & Noble Nook, Amazon released a statement saying how its Kindle sales were already topping 2009 holiday sales. "It's still October and we've already sold more Kindle devices since launch than we did during the entire fourth quarter of last year--astonishing because the fourth quarter is the busiest time of year on Amazon," Steve Kessel, senior VP, Amazon Kindle said at the time.

Considering E-book Marketshare

The Kindle, in some people's opinion, isn't a direct iPad competitor, which is true. It does, however, compete for e-book marketshare with its Kindle e-bookstore. And there, analysts have projected falling numbers for Amazon over the next five years. For example, in February, Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang told The Wall St. Journal that it expects Amazon's share of e-book business to fall from 90% to around 30% by 2015.

"Near term, we suspect that the iPad and the new eBook agency pricing model, which requires that Amazon increase retail prices to be more consistent with Apple's pricing, will provide Kindle with the most market share headwind," said Wang. "Going forward, we can envision a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market."

But a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage. So let me invoke my former life as a literature PhD student here to say, "This is incredibly farking cool."

Using Google's Books Ngram Viewer, you can now visualize how language and literature have changed over time, by searching a subset of the more than 15 million books that Google has digitized since 2004. All told, today's datasets contain more than 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often these occurred each year, providing a great deal of insight - for scholars and casual word hounds - into how language usage changes over time. The datasets were the basis of a research project led by Harvard University's Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden and published today in Science that demonstrates how quantitative analysis of texts can offer new insights into areas including censorship, technology adoption, and cultural memory.

And now Google has put that visualization tool into everyone's hands, along with the ability to download the raw data.

Language, Literature, Culture Over Time

Take the word "farking" that I used above. Usage of the word has risen and fallen over the years, skyrocketing not surprisingly once it became the curse-du-jour in the reprised Battlestar Galactica series. If that's too pedestrian, compare the changing usage for spaceship, spacecraft, rocket, and UFO. Or the frequency of communism, anarchism, socialism, and capitalism over the course of the twentieth century. Or the decline of man.

New Quantitative Tools for Scholars

By mining this data, scholars are able to shed new light onto many things we've long assumed about literature, language and culture. According to Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (whose work on the datasets, specifically the Victorian era, was featured in a recent article in The New York Times), the release of the Ngram Viewer is a "real win" as it provides "an easy-to-use research site and, even better, the raw data behind it."

This is an incredible amount of data, a boon to researchers in both the humanities and social sciences. as well as a pretty fun tool for the more casual lit-geeks and word-lovers among us.