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According to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos, "millions of people now own Kindles." Sadly, Amazon has always kept the exact number of Kindle sales under wraps. According to some analysts, consumers in the US bought roughly 3 million e-readers in 2009 and the majority of these were probably Kindles. Amazon also doesn't release any data about how many e-books it sells. In a press release that accompanied the company's Q4 earnings report, however, Amazon yesterday announced that it now sells six Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both editions are available.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Apple's new iPad will be a great device for reading e-books. The iPad will obviously come with Apple's own e-reader software - but that's only half the story. Users will also be able to read their Kindle and B&N e-book purchases on Apple's new device. After all, nobody is going to stop Amazon, B&N and any of the independent e-book publishers from creating their own applications. That is, of course, unless Apple decides that these apps now "duplicate" a core feature of its own apps and decides to ban all other e-reader apps from the devices.

While there are a million rumors over what Apple's new tablet will do, from having a built-in Web cam to doing your laundry (not really), we can be sure that it will at least have a color display and show pictures, right? These simple features would put it well ahead of the Kindle in the newspaper industry's hopes of finding a savior in new technology.

A study out of the University of Georgia took a look at whether or not the Kindle would be a viable substitute for the traditional newspaper and it found the device lacking in a few key areas.

Amazon quietly made a major change to its Digital Text Platform last week that went largely unnoticed: Small publishers and individual authors who use the Digital Text Platform can now opt out of the Kindle's digital rights management (DRM) program. While this change only affects a relatively small number of publishers and authors for now, this move could hint at a larger change in Amazon's DRM policy. Right now, Amazon's DRM policy means that its customers can't transfer their books to a non-Kindle e-reader.

Amazon just announced that it is now offering publishers and authors a new 70% royalty option. Publishers and authors who choose this option will receive 70% of the list price from sales of their e-books in the Kindle store. In order to qualify for this option, publishers have to turn on the text-to-speech feature and make the e-book available in all locations for which the author or publisher has rights. In addition, publishers also have to sell the e-book for at least 20% below the price of the physical book and can't charge more than $9.99 for the Kindle edition.

Copia, a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia's e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers, as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books.

Amazon just announced that November was its best month ever for Kindle sales. This excludes sales from today's so-called Cyber Monday. According to Amazon, the $259 Kindle is the "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." Barnes & Noble is also seeing strong demand for its new nook e-reader, but is unable to fulfill current orders before Christmas. The company has also delayed shipments to its stores until December 7.

Amazon just released a free e-book reader application for Windows PCs. The Kindle for PC application allows Amazon customers to read Kindle books on their Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. A Mac version will follow soon. The application was clearly designed to work on a wide variety of computers and works especially well on netbooks and touchscreen devices. Besides being capable of working with Amazon's proprietary e-book format, the app can also display e-books in the .mobi file format.

Barnes and Noble will launch its rumored Nook eBook reader later today at an event in New York City. Thanks to an early leak of the device on the B&N Web site, however, we already know most of the details about the Nook. We can now confirm, for example, that the Nook will retail for $259 and that it will feature two screens: a small LCD touchscreen at the bottom of the device and a standard 6-inch eInk display above the smaller screen. The Nook will be available for pre-order today and will ship on November 30. One of the most interesting aspects about the device, besides the two screens, the 2 gigabytes of on-board memory and the microSD card slot, is that B&N will allow users to lend books to their friends.

There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. Today, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. Forrester now expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 and that 30% of these will sell during the holiday season. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders. For 2010, Forrester projects eReader sales of up to 10 million.

When Barnes & Noble launched its eBook store, it immediately attracted a lot of potential customers. According to Compete's Dillon McGovern, more than four times as many people visited the eBook section on B&N's website than the Amazon Kindle store during the first week after the launch in July. After just about a month, though, these numbers returned to normality and today Amazon once again leads the pack by a very wide margin. While B&N was able to attract a lot of interest in its new eBook offerings, it was clearly hurt by the fact that it didn't offer users a hardware eReader yet.

Even though some people are seriously asking this question today, the answer is obviously a resounding "no." There can be no doubt that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's sequel to the immensely popular Da Vinci Code, will sell extremely well on the Kindle and may easily turn out to be the bestselling fiction title on the Kindle of all time. The fact that the Kindle edition is currently outselling the hardcover edition on Amazon hints at some of the advantages eBooks have over regular books, but there can be no doubt that the paper editions of The Lost Symbol will easily outsell the eBook version.

EBooks and eReaders are a hot topic right now, especially with the new line-up of Kindle competitors scheduled to arrive before the holiday season. However, according to a new report by Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps, most people aren't willing to pay a lot for these devices. Forrester asked consumers at what price they would consider an eReader expensive but still buy it. The answer was generally somewhere between $50 and $99.

Hardly a day went by this week without a major new announcement in the eBook and eReader arena. The wireless eReaders from Sony and the Irex/Barnes & Noble partnership were probably some of the most interesting announcements. In addition, Google also opened up its EPUB archive, which will give readers easy access to over 1 million free public-domain books for their eReaders. The only company that didn't have anything to announce this week was Amazon, which is now in danger of losing its early lead to Sony and Barnes & Noble.

Sony today announced that it will sell a wireless eReader device for $399 by Christmas. The Reader Daily Edition will be powered by AT&T's 3G network. That in itself is interesting news, especially given that Barnes & Noble announced a similar device in partnership with Irex yesterday. What's gotten somewhat lost in all the excitement about the hardware, however, is that Sony has also partnered with a number of independent booksellers in the US. These include over 200 members of the American Booksellers Association, as well as BooksOnBoard, Net Galley, and Portland, OR-based Powell's Books, the world's largest independent bookseller. In addition, Sony also plans to make it easier for users to check out eBooks from their local libraries.

All the major eBook vendors are currently trying to expand their eBook and eReader line-ups as fast as possible in order to compete with Amazon. Today, Barnes & Noble announced that it has partnered with Irex Technologies, a Dutch eReader manufacturer. B&N will sell Irex's new consumer-focused device in its stores and online later this year. B&N already signed a deal with Plastic Logic earlier this year. Irex already offers a number of different eReaders in its store, but this device looks to be specifically designed to take on the Kindle. It will feature an 8.1-inch touchscreen with stylus navigation and a 3G wireless connection.

In this fourth part of our investigation into the ongoing changes in the book publishing business, we look at the author's point of view. What are they getting today? What would they like to get? What can they reasonably expect to get as this drama unfolds? Authors are the creative juice of the whole eco-system. If they don't create material that people want to read, no one will make any money.

Their struggles in the old model have been well documented (of course, we should have expected them to write about their experiences): the starving writer up in the garret who uses rejection letters from publishers for wallpaper is an established literary hack. In the new world of print on demand, e-books and social media marketing, the author takes center stage. Those with an appetite for it can really take control of their work and commercial fortune.

CourseSmart, a leading player in the budding eTextbook market, just released its first iPhone application. Thanks to this app, students can now access college textbooks they have leased from the company on their phones. CourseSmart currently offers over 7,000 eTextbooks and, in addition to the iPhone, also offers software for Macs and Windows PCs. CourseSmart notes that students at over 5,000 colleges have bought textbooks through the company. It is important to note, though, that while CourseSmart's textbooks are cheaper than hard copies, they also expire after 180 days.

Sony just dropped the price of all new releases and New York Times bestseller titles in its eBook store to $9.99. In addition, the company also announced two new hardware eReaders: the Sony Reader Pocket Edition with a five-inch screen for $199 and the Reader Touch Edition ($299) with a touch screen and Memory Stick and SD card expansion slots. The new devices will be available by the end of August.

While Sony has always offered very attractive eReaders, the prices in Sony's eBook store were a deal-breaker for many who had been considering buying a Sony eBook reader. Amazon generally charges $9.99 for an eBook, but until today, Sony often asked for $11.99 or more.

According to a new report by Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps, eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, Rotman Epps predicts that later adopters will not feel the same loyalty towards Amazon. This, according to the report, will open up a lot of opportunities for other players in the market, including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.