In fact, the little six foot display table set up at Borders to display its ereader lineup, a country cousin to the gleaming Nook Huts with their Kate Spade accessories sections that are popping up at the stores of arch-competitor Barnes and Noble, offers more food for thought to the ereader aficionado than just about anything I can think of.

At one end of the table is the Cruz, and at the other is the Aluratek Libre eBook Reader Pro. That little distance encompasses about a decade or more of ereader device history. The Libre is almost a curiousity in 2010, a device with a monochrome LCD screen like the early PDAs (think Palm Pilot), a cable connection for managing content, and a plastic housing with a lot on buttons that are not particularly intuitive in their operation. Readers of this  blog know that I am a fan of smaller ereaders and would still be writing about the Sony Pocket Edition if Sony didn’t keep changing their lineup. So there is allure to the Aluratek, but it is the allure of the past. I have to credit them with making that LCD screen even look like an e-ink screen; I found that kind of amazing (and savvy–buyer beware, that is not an e-ink screen). What else makes the Aluratek a thing of the past? The price. It feels like the folks at Aluratek said to themselves, gosh, nobody in the marketplace has a sub-$100 reader, so why shouldn’t we keep our margins as high as possible? But anyone who recognizes the name Len Edgerly knows that the most expensive component in e-ink readers like the Kindle or Nook is the e-ink screen. And this device doesn’t have one! Aluratek could potentially make a nice little business for itself selling these very limited devices for $79. I can make the case that schools can get everything they need from an ereader by selecting the Libre, specifically because its retro technology would increase the benefit to cost ratio for schools. But that can only happen if Aluratek prices its retro reader aggressively for the limited features it offers. There’s a competitor sitting six feet away on the table at Borders which, for a mere $80 more, offers up-to-date technology, color, wireless, bigger screen, touch screen, um, and much better value. Technology of the past can still work, but not at prices of the present.

Sitting in the middle of the Borders lineup is the Kobo Reader. Now the Kobo is a nice little reader, though it doesn’t do the same things that a first generation Kindle could do in 2008, and it is priced higher than the third generation Kindle that you can order from Amazon today, or pick up at the local Target store. [Update: Kobo announced this week a device with wifi that is priced the same as Kindle 3.] What the Kobo has going for it is its simplicity (the Aluratek device looks like a television remote in comparison) and an apparently terrific corporate parent committed to open platforms and systems. I mean, these guys have an eReader Bill of Rights, including stuff like “the right to freedom of movement.” (With Amazon, you have the right to buy from Amazon.) It is great to see someone mapping out a niche that might be able to co-exist with the corporate might of Amazon, and even challenge it in some instances. Getting its device on par with the Kindle in value is a great first step. This device represents the “present” of ereaders on display at Borders.

So what about the future? How about devices that are not much more bulky than the ultra-lightweight Kindle or Kobo (sorry, the iPad is not in this class for weight), that are running the open Android software, that offer enhanced web browsing (sorry, Webkit or no, the Kindle is never going to be an workable alternative for web access), and that are incredibly competitive on price. Enter the Cruz Reader. $199? Are you kidding me? I bought two Kindle 1s in the last 24 months at a total investment of over $700. Oh, and an iPad for almost that much (and I only got one of them for the money). Can I find $199 for a seven-inch touch tablet running a great OS, an app store, and a really nice reading interface? This, boys and girls, is the future of ereading, on display at Borders today.

That’s the real conundrum in the mix–Borders. Borders has for sale more credible ereader options than anyone else: a retro tech reader that could define the “real” low end of the market, a state-of-the-art ereader with a genuine corporate presence and a bookstore partner, and a glimpse-of-the-future small tablet with features that we all expect to have on the smartphone in our pockets, including capable ereader software. Can Borders really become the retailer that offers folks like me genuine options in ereading? Based on what they have sitting on their six-foot conference table, Borders offers the best and maybe the only place where options can be found today. I like that.

Finally, let me make a prediction. Currently, I own 2 Kindle 1s, 1 Kindle 2, 1 Kindle DX, 1 Kindle 3, 1 Nook, one Sony Pocket Edition, assorted other brand ereaders from 2009 whose names escape me at the moment (Cybook? Astak?), 1 iPhone, 1 Droid phone, 1 iPad–and I read on every single one of them. What do I predict is going to be my next purchase of an ereader?

That’s right, an Android tablet device like the Cruz Reader or the upcoming Tablet from Velocity Micro.

So I used Kindlepedia to make an article on LCross, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, from the page at Wikipedia. You can download it here.

One nice feature of viewing this article on Kindle for PC is that all the external links are live, meaning that you can follow all the footnotes and references to their sources. Of course, you can also use those links if you are reading on your Kindle and the Whispernet wireless connection is on.

At any rate, we are back on the moon, and the article points out that the results from LCROSS are expected to have a big impact on a decision about whether we ever could colonize the moon. With the amount of water kicked up by this little rock-throwing experiment, I’d say the future of the moon looks bright.

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama

What I liked reading in the coverage of the event were the comments of school children themselves, most of who were pretty impressed that the President would take the time to speak to them directly…about anything. How did your students react?

Kindlepedia has been a remarkable success since we launched it at the beginning of June.  Since then, hundreds of readers have requested articles in pristine Mobipocket format, perfect for reading on the Kindle, and, by the beginning of August, we topped 1,000 articles served. The list of created articles reads like a roadmap of the human mind–just see the Wordle I made from the topics folks selected above, courtesy of www.wordle.net.

I have also formatted some background information about the speech from Wikipedia by using a new tool we have developed in conjunction with Joshua Tallent and his team at eBook Architects. You can download the backgrounder here, or scoot on over the the “Kindlepedia” tool and create a file on this or any other topic for yourself.

Yes, the 50th anniversary was yesterday.

This book is intended for younger readers, a group that thinks 50 years ago someone like, um, Eisenhower was president. But it works for us oldsters as well! In his review of the book, Kindle enthusiast Len Edgerly says that “the book…is full of joy and savvy appreciation of Buddy Holly’s place in the history of American music,” putting him “less at risk of becoming the most famous rock star that young people have never heard of.”

Thanks to Staton for this great contribution to the history of a generation of music lovers who were very much around 50 years ago and thanks, too, for making this book a “Kindle exclusive.”

You can get the file here, save it to your desktop, and then connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cord. Just drag the Inaugural Address file into the “documents” file that will appear in the window opened for the Kindle. Pull the USB cord, check the Menu, and you are good to go! 

This Saturday, there was also an article about G. K. Chesterton entitled “A Century of Thursdays.” The author, Allen Barra, celebrates the enduring influence of a writer who was, at best, for many of us, a section of reading in a college Brit Lit textbook, and a small section at that.

Barra certainly caught my attention when he noted that Chesterton was “quoted freely” during the campaign by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and that President-elect Obama’s followers “claim to see the influence of Chesterton’s thought on [his] worldview.”

But I really sat up when Barra describes the work that is arguably Chesterton’s most well-known, the novella The Man Who Was Thursday:

Set in a surrealistic London of shadowy, labyrinthine streets, the plot is populated by poets posing as undercover policemen and policemen pretending to be anarchists. This may sound slapstick, but “The Man Who Was Thursday” presages the dark clouds gathering over Europe before World War I.

An air of impending dread pervades the novel; the term “anarchist,” after all, stirred the fear 100 years ago that “terrorist” does today.

Sounds interesting. So I got to wondering if this classic is available on the Kindle–I mean, that’s where I discovered it. And indeed it is, put in the Kindle store by publishers of the print edition and others. If you browse for it, you will find a price point that you’ll like.

As you can tell from the Downloads page, though, I have taken an interest in getting texts formatted well for the Kindle, and so I have attempted a version of Chesterton’s classic. It is done in Mobipocket format, which doesn’t seem to offer all the bells and whistles of an AZW file, but what the heck? This one is free…;-)