ReadWriteWeb

Online retailer Amazon will begin highlighting Kindle's paid e-books following a small but significant change to its bestseller list due out in "a few weeks": it will split its top-sellers into two lists, one paid, one free. Currently, the Amazon Kindle Bestseller list is a mix of free and paid books and, not surprisingly, the free books dominate the list. Even today, as this article goes to press (so to speak - is that still valid terminology for the Web?), only two of the top 10 books lists are paid. In the top 20, only three more paid books can be found.

A software update for Kindle and Kindle DX is on deck, according to Amazon.

Kindle Version 2.5 will provide pan and zoom for PDFs, allow you to assemble your books into collections and to use larger, sharper fonts. Interestingly, you will be able to post selections from your reading to Facebook and to Twitter directly from your Kindle.

During today's iPhone OS 4 event, Apple announced that it plans to bring iBooks and the iBookstore to the iPhone once the new OS becomes available later this year. It is not clear, however, why Apple plans to wait this long to bring its e-reader software and e-book store to the iPhone. After all, being able to sync books between the two devices would put Apple's feature set close to being on par with Amazon's Kindle platform.

Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad, we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader.

Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13" MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad. The question, though, is if programs like this aren't a bit premature, given that nobody has actually used the device yet and that we don't really know how well the iPad will work for textbooks and other school-related activities.

The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple's iPad launches.

According to the latest stats from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), e-book usage is growing fast, but continues to represent a very small part of the publishing industry's bottom line. Currently, only about 2% of American book buyers over 13 are active e-book users.

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.