While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Day 3:

• The GigaOM Show: Google I/O themes and takeways that affect you
• The future, according to Google
• Some of the best articles you need to read about Google I/O
• A sneak peek at YouTube’s future as it rolls out new channel design for everyone
• Redbox Instant is coming to Google TV soon, Roku up next

Day 2:

• So Google Compute Engine is out, your move Amazon
• Google, NASA quantum computing project could bring stronger machine learning to the masses
• SMS integration coming to Google Hangouts. Will Google Voice follow?
• Google CEO Larry Page: Do as I say, not as I do
• How Google Music wants to take on Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody
• Google jumpstarts Glass development with apps form Twitter, Facebook and Evernote
• What do good shoes, Google+ and Facebook have in common?
• How Google cleverly improved Android without releasing Android 4.3 at Google I/O
• The road less traveled: How Google does Streetview for the world’s oceans
• Why Google thinks the GPU is the engine for the web of the future

Day 1:

• Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
• Google I/O statshot: 900 million Android devices activated
• Google Apps set for a communication upgrade with deeper Google+ integration
• Google officially launches its music subscription service at Google I/O
• Google turns up location data usage on Android apps
• What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+
• Prepaid gives Google a huge Android boost (and Apple has noticed)
• Eight years later, Google reinvents its Maps for a data rich web
• Coming to a school near you: Google launches Android app store for education
• How Google is setting the new search standard with voice and knowledge graph
• Google TV will receive Android 4.2.2 update as well as latest version of Chrome
• And, bam! Here’s Google Compute Engine
• Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
• Here’s the real theme of Google I/O: Service unification between Chrome and Android
• Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass
• Google gains appeal for cloud services, but there’s this company called Amazon

Pre-show expectations:

• Why the time has come for Android @Home to finally make a splash
• Google I/O: Arming for the battle of the public cloud stars
• What to expect for Chrome and Android at Google I/O 2013
• Where to watch Google I/O 2013 live online
• Reports: Google will launch music subscription service at I/O

Great UX, thwarted by walled gardens

Readmill is a great reading environment. That their designers obsess on visceral user experience makes it a true pleasure to use. It may very well be the best “feeling” ereader application out there. This is a critical attribute for an environment in which you can spend hours a day.

But it suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it.

This is a discussion less about DRM (although, it is that, too) and more about seamless user experience. Sure, you can hunt down a copy of “Gone Girl” on a website you’ve never bought a book from before. Enter your credit-card information. Download it. Then upload it to your Readmill account. Or, you can click “Buy now with 1-Click” on Amazon.com and have it on all your devices in 10 seconds, ready to be read in the Kindle reading application. You have to be really persuasive to beat that kind of convenience.

Since Amazon would never allow its library to be accessed by reading applications other than Kindle, this is a non-trivial problem for a startup like Readmill to surmount.

A community to challenge Amazon

Goodreads has always been a bit of an enigma. Truth be told, I’ve never been an avid user. There’s a number of reasons why, but the biggest is simply that the distance between my books — and the activity that happens within them — and Goodreads has always seemed ginormous. That is, updating reading statuses for books on a website always felt odd and forced. It felt odd in 2007 when I was mainly reading physical books, and it feels odder still in 2013, where I’m mainly reading Kindle books. That said, 16 million people clearly don’t agree with me.

So why did Amazon buy Goodreads? Well, the promise of a collaboration between Goodreads and a great reading platform (like Readmill) loomed large. A combination like that had the chance of being the Last Great Stand against Amazon. Goodreads is many things but most defensibly it is a community. A strong community. An engaged community. (And now, a slightly enraged community.) Sixteen million users is nothing to dismiss. It’s not Facebook or Instagram levels, but 16 million excited people is a firehose to be reckoned with. What Goodreads didn’t have was a reading application.

It also should be noted that publishers love Goodreads. No surprise there; it’s just as one would imagine. Goodreads is an amazing platform for promoting books to an avid, core readership. So if Goodreads were to develop a reading application, it doesn’t take much imagination to see them signing up the catalogs of the big five and launching a Goodreads store for the Goodreads reader. And were that reading application to plug seamlessly into the Goodreads ecosystem — the community — then getting those 16 million users to switch from Kindle to Goodreads Reader would have been one of the easier platform sells in publishing.

Goodreads users already want to hang out at Goodreads. If they could read there too — in an app — I suspect many would.

Kindle flaws present opportunity

Despite the maturity of the market, the tablet reading space is still weirdly under-polished. Kindle reading environments have hardly changed in the last three years. The Kindle app has seen some improvement — mainly in support for complex KF8 formatted titles — but the polish around the reading experience, that visceral component, for novels and other mass-market books has remained largely unchanged. Books in the Kindle applications still don’t hyphenate. And page slides still stutter ever so slightly. These are small details that add up.

Certain polish aside, Kindle’s strengths are manifold. It has a vast catalog and transactional trust. It has all our credit-card information, making purchasing seamless. It is also supremely good at cloud data — consistent and reliable storage and retrieval of our books across devices. What it doesn’t have — and no inkling or iota of — is community.

What might have been

So you can see, there was a combo here. A curious matchup. Take one of the most polished, most satisfying digital book reading applications and merge it with one of the most engaged reading-specific communities. A marketplace could have developed that might have been the first real competition against Kindle. Not one built around competing with Kindle toe-to-toe as Barnes & Noble and Kobo have attempted (and failed at), but competing on ground on which Amazon has no footing: community.

It’s a certainty that Amazon, too, saw this. Which is why the sale this week comes as little surprise. I’ve always imagined that secretly, deep down in the murky stacks of Amazon headquarters, they had a crackerjack team making kindle.amazon.com the best social reading network in the world. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just realized it would be easier to buy the one that already existed.

Craig Mod is an independent writer, designer and publisher focused on publishing and storytelling. You can follow him on Twitter @craigmod.

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Photo courtesy Vitchanan Photography/Shutterstock.com.

Norwegian technology blogger Martin Bekkelund describes how his friend Linn Jordet Nygaard found that her Amazon account had been shut down and access to all of her Kindle books (about 60 of them) had been blocked. Although some initial reports said that her books had been wiped from her device remotely — echoing an earlier incident several years ago, in which Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindles because of a licensing error — it later emerged that Nygaard’s Kindle had malfunctioned, but she still wasn’t able to access her books even through her account.

Amazon controls the books, not you the “owner”

When she asked why her account had been shut down and access to her books denied, Nygaard got emails that appeared to be from Amazon support that said her account had been linked to another account that breached the company’s rules, and therefore it could not be restored. But the staffer wouldn’t say how they were linked, or what the other account had done to provoke the suspension. As the email — included by Bekkelund in his blog post — put it:

“While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened.”

According to several further updates, including one from a British blogger who spoke to her, Nygaard had a previous Kindle with which she bought and read books through an Amazon UK account (even though she lives in Norway). She later gave that to her mother and bought another one — a pre-owned device she acquired from a Danish classifieds site — and switched her account over to it. After sending it in for service, she got the emails from Amazon service telling her that her account had been blocked.

One popular theory is that this second-hand Kindle could have been linked to some kind of previous infraction. BoingBoing founder and author Cory Doctorow has his own theory, however: that Nygaard’s account got flagged because she bought books through Amazon UK but isn’t an actual British resident. As he notes, retailers often have a somewhat perverse approach to markets like Norway where publishing rights aren’t negotiated separately, and book buyers can get caught in the middle (many consumers in countries where Amazon doesn’t operate do the same thing that Nygaard did by buying through Amazon UK).

Ebooks have benefits, but there is a downside

Even though the details of her infraction aren’t clear, and Amazon hasn’t provided any kind of coherent response about why it happened (I will update this post if one appears), there are still more than enough warning flags about this case to serve as a reminder of how little control we actually have over the books we supposedly “buy” from providers like Amazon. The most obvious, of course, is that — rightly or wrongly — Nygaard can’t access any of the books she supposedly “owned.”

Amazon may have taken the action it did for totally justifiable reasons, at least according to its rules, and it may turn out to be a misunderstanding that eventually gets cleared up — but the reality is that Nygaard can’t access the books she bought and paid for, just as surely as if employees at Amazon had come to her house and removed them physically from her bookshelves. Of course, that kind of thing would never happen, but the outcome is fundamentally the same.

Update: Nygaard says that her account has been restored, along with all of her books, but it’s still not clear why it was blocked or unavailable.

As I’ve tried to point out before, both publishers and distributors like Amazon have spent the past decade or so removing rights that we used to have when books were physical property, and were something that you actually bought — along with the right to resell and/or lend them to whomever you wished, whenever you wished. Those rights no longer exist, which is why it’s better to think of an ebook purchase as an agreement to rent access under specific terms rather than an actual acquisition of something tangible.

There are a whole pile of benefits to ebooks, obviously, including the ability to read them across multiple devices (although that is also often restricted) as well as to share digital highlights, and to avoid the physical encumbrance of having to lug around an actual book. But there are some fairly severe tradeoffs as well, and every now and then Amazon reminds us what they are.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Carlos andre Santos.]

While Google revealed this month that it would be applying for names like “.youtube” and “.lol”, Amazon has so far been silent about its domain name ambitions. The process, which is being run by internet naming authority ICANN, offers an opportunity for companies to control new top level domain names that will join familiar ones like “.com” and “.org”

Amazon is the only applicant for a number of names like “.author,” “.audible,” “.fire” as well as its own name, “.amazon.” It is competing with other companies, however, for a number of names related to its core business such as “.books” and “.buy”. The competitors for the “.book” name don’t appear to be publishers but are instead internet companies that make money selling website names.

Amazon’s most interesting application may be for “.news,” a field where the retail giant has so far had little involvement. There are six other applicants for “.news” and none of these companies are recognizable news or media brands.

In the case of the names that have multiple bids, ICANN will evaluate the applicants on technical merits and in some cases have an auction. The applications cost a non-refundable $185,000 each and successful bidders will be obliged to pay high ongoing annual fees to ICANN. Many of the new domain names are expected to go live next year.

Here is a link to the rest of the list. We will have a full explanation of the new names and what they mean to consumers and businesses later today.

Amazon is making the software attractive, not only with feature parity to its Android version but also with a storage deal for new users. While everyone gets 5 GB of storage for free, for a limited time, Amazon is throwing in unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no additional cost when purchasing a Cloud Storage data plan for other files.

As someone who quickly moved away from the iTunes music store when Amazon offered DRM-free music at a low cost, I gave the app a quick run-through on my iPhone 4S. It’s surely as good as the Android version and, in my opinion, looks even better.

Streaming songs I have on Amazon’s servers sounded great and a quick download test worked fine. You can manage playlists in the app and it will pull in any existing music on your device for playback. The added benefit here: AirPlay support is built into the app. I did find one minor issue though, as the app doesn’t support a landscape view.

True fans of the iTunes music store may not see much benefit here. But as an advocate and heavy user of cross-platform solutions, I think Amazon’s support for iOS is great news. And with the daily deals offered in Amazon’s MP3 store, the company could get a few more sales from iOS owners that it couldn’t before.

“Whenever we needed money, we’d rob the airport. To us, it was better than Citibank.” — Henry Hill, Goodfellas

Seven years ago, Walmart controlled nearly half of a U.S. DVD sell-through business that generated nearly $16.3 billion in annual revenue. But even with disc sales plunging below $9 billion last year, and overall home entertainment revenue dipping to $18 billion from $24.3 billion over that same span, Hollywood’s movie business is still beholden to Walmart’s Bentonville, Ark. headquarters.

Fortunately for them, studio executives — and members of the media and tech press — only needed to travel about 15 miles East on the 60 Freeway to Rosemead, Calif., Wednesday to see the retailer show off what might be the home entertainment business’ last hope to resuscitate growth, the so-called “Disc to Digital” service.

Disc to Digital is a key component of the major studios’ UltraViolet initiative, which is designed to let consumers store digital  versions of the movies they’ve purchased on disc in a cloud.

Starting Monday, within the photo processing areas inside about 3,500 U.S. Walmart stores, consumers can begin uploading their disc collections to the cloud, paying $2 for each authenticated title (or $5 if they want to convert a standard-definition DVD to a high-def digital file).

$2 and two minutes of your time

I showed up at Wednesday’s demo at about 1:15 p.m., right ahead of a small contingent of Universal Home Entertainment executives, led by division president Craig Kornblau, holding a DVD copy of Universal’s 1997 Jim Carrey hit Liar Liar.

“Hurry, I just can’t wait to get into the cloud,” the affable Kornblau quipped, delighting a small cadre of chain and consortium PR staffers, as well as store employees who were still learning about how to administer the Disc to Digital service.

I had forgotten to bring my discs for upload, but Louis, a kind Walmart employee loaned me a copy of Warner Bros.’ 1990 Martin Scorsese gangster classic Goodfellas, so that I could test drive the system.

Walmart’s Disc to Digital service enables users of UltraViolet-authenticated DVD and Blu-ray titles to also own digital versions of their movies in Vudu, the retailer’s popular digital movie rental and sell-through service. Since I’m already a happily registered Vudu user, getting set up was pretty easy.

I filled out a form, offering up my Vudu user email, and also indicating what version of Goodfellas I wished to upload (I chose HD).

About two minutes later, Louis emerged from a computer workstation — he had stamped the disc with a little Walmart insignia, so that it couldn’t be authenticated again, and I had a high-def version of Goodfellas waiting for me in my Vudu account, ready to download or stream to a wide range of living-room and mobile devices, and share with select family members.

Bringing back $20 movie purchases

The system is designed to rekindle consumers’ willingness to buy movies rather than merely stream them on platforms like Netflix. Last month, research firm IHS Screen Digest, for example, noted that low-margin movie and TV show streams will surpass  higher-margin disc sales and rentals in quantity, with the overall home entertainment sector still continuing to see revenue declines.

As of late February — about four months after launch — UltraViolet had claimed only around 1 million sign-ups. However, the Hollywood majors — who will greatly expand the number of UltraViolet-eligible titles to around 4,000 on Monday — hope the inclusion of Walmart and Vudu will accelerate the initiative’s buy-in.

Having already talked to a number of ranking home entertainment executives who are quietly pessimistic regarding UltraViolet’s success, I still left Rosemead Wednesday slightly excited.

The house of no Mouse

With a trip to my mother-in-law’s retirement-community condo rendered upon me for this upcoming weekend, I saw value in being able to watch Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito savagely beat and murder all who annoyed him as I distracted myself with Goodfellas on my iPad 2. But since a wireless connection isn’t available there, I might be as out of luck as Michael Imperioli’s poor, half-witted Spider — on the iPad, Vudu will only let me stream the movie and not download it. (I can always buy it again on iTunes — Apple, which is conspicuously absent from the UltraViolet grouping, will let me download movies to the iPad, of course — but the whole point of UltraViolet is supposed to be about letting me enjoy the movie on any device I want with a single purchase.)

Then there’s title availability. Any urge to selflessly provide my 6-year-old son the same kind of relief with a downloaded copy of Cars 2 or Toy Story 3 can’t happen either, whether or not I can find a wireless connection, since the biggest supplier of kids’ movies, Disney, doesn’t do UltraViolet.

Meanwhile, not every title from every participating studio is available. For example, as we reported earlier this week, Fox movies like Rise of the Planet of the Apes become unavailable on platforms like UltraViolet and Apple’s iCloud once they enter any of HBO’s pay-TV windows.

“Today, everything is different … I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” — Henry Hill