The Aura HD is “only for those people who really, really care about reading in their lives,” Michael Tamblyn, the company’s EVP of content, sales and merchandising, told me. (Kobo’s marketing materials call it “the Porsche of e-readers.”) According to Kobo’s customer research, Tamblyn said, 90 percent of its e-reader users intend to purchase a new e-reader in the next year and “want to see what the next generation of e-ink looks like.” Thirty-six percent of Kobo e-reader customers, Tamblyn said, also own a tablet but “an e-ink device continues to be the primary way they do their reading.”

The Aura HD has a larger screen than most e-readers — 6.8 inches, compared to the standard six-inch screen. Like the Glo, it has a built-in light. The screen’s resolution is 265 DPI, which Kobo says is the highest resolution of any e-ink screen on the market. (Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite also has a high-resolution screen, but Amazon doesn’t state the number of pixels, saying only that it has “62 percent more” of them.) Storage is 4 GB and is expandable. The device is designed to be extra-comfortable to hold. Battery life is up to two months with the light on or off.

The Aura HD is available for preorder in North America at Kobo.com starting April 16, and will be available in stores in Canada and the U.K. on April 25. It should be in U.S. stores in May or June, though the company couldn’t get more specific than that. Kobo says it will announce international availability soon.

At $169, the Aura HD is more expensive than any of Kobo’s other e-readers and more expensive than the competition (the Wi-Fi Kindle Paperwhite is $119 with ads and $139 without; the Nook Simple Touch with Glow Light is $119.) The company will continue to focus on the $129.99 Kobo Glo as our “widest-adoption device,” Tamblyn said. But “for those readers who are most passionate about reading, they weren’t necessarily interested in finding the cheapest device possible…These are people buying hundreds of books every year and often reading several books a week. For those people, price is simply less important.”

Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005. For the next five years, he served at the company in a number of Kindle-related roles, helping to launch the first two Kindle models and the Kindle DX. “I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all,” he writes. “I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I’ve traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I’ve watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I’ve talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks.”

I found Burning the Page the most interesting when Merkoski discusses his experience at Amazon, working directly for CEO Jeff Bezos. “I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop,” he wrote. But he can’t share much:

• “I believe Jeff [Bezos] wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.”
• “The Kindle organization was in some ways a startup within Amazon and benefited from Jeff Bezos’s venture capital infusions, long-range vision, and full support.”
• “Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.”

While Merkoski describes himself as “the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop,” he doesn’t (and may be legally unable to) provide any inside scoops in this book. So the next best thing is when he can speak specifically about e-reading platforms — including the advantages of Amazon’s competitors. The development of the Kindle was highly secretive: “No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning,” Merkoski writes. That resulted, in 2007, in a $399 device that sold out in five and a half hours, remained out of stock for months and got a lot of mixed reviews (facts that Merkoski doesn’t mention).

Kindle’s flaws — and what competitors did better

Future versions of the Kindle improved on some flaws: Merkoski calls the Kindle 2, introduced in 2009, “truly an incredible device.” But “in fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia…Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.”

Kindle competitors, he says, have done better in lots of ways. Take Barnes & Noble: “Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They’re the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive e-ink screens…They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital. They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group.” Likewise, “companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more playful…let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle.” The winner on that front, he says, is Apple’s iPad.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes, “Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war…Competitors like Barnes & Noble and Apple have successfully blurred the lines and proven that they can provide a great media experience, so Amazon’s brand matters less in the eyes of readers now.” He says “it’s hard to love Amazon…at best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products.”

Oddly, Merkoski doesn’t mention the Nook division’s terrible performance these days, or the company’s inability to cut into Amazon’s market share. Nooks, he claims, are “downright futuristic.” And that’s really where he wants to go in this book: How will ebooks, reading and writing change?

What’s next: High-speed head plugs and a “Facebook for books”?

Let’s be clear: Merkoski loves books. An endless number of sentences like “Books are priceless,” “Books can inspire us toward greatness,” “Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some,” “Reading is an act of bathyspheric descent into the depths of an inky-black ocean,” “For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you” become increasingly irritating as the book goes on and weigh down Merkoski’s ideas on what the future of reading could actually look like.

Once you cut through the platitudes, Merkoski envisions some specific innovations that are interesting and imaginative. For instance, “the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience.” That sounds horrible to me, but another idea — a screenless e-reader that uses a pico projector to project an ebook onto a blank surface (like a ceiling or the pages of a blank book), pulls ebooks from the cloud and is navigated by voice commands — seems like something that could actually exist in a few years.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes there will be

“just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from an ebook and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link, or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading…The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes.”

The company best situated to make this dream a reality is not Amazon, Merkoski believes, but Google — thanks to its knowledge of search engines and the vast number of titles it’s scanned for Google book search, “Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library.”

For now, rights issues are in the way, and so books, “our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration, aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain books that lag by at least ninety years.” It will take “a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models,” Merkoski acknowledges, before such a hyperlinked database of books can legally exist — even though we have the technology to put it in place now.

Kobo makes four devices: The 5-inch Kobo Mini e-reader, for $79.99; the touchscreen Kobo Touch e-reader, for $99.99; the front-lit Kobo Glo e-reader, for $129.99; and the Kobo Arc Android tablet, for $199.99. Last year, the company stopped selling them through its website and only made them available through chains like Target and Best Buy as well as the independent bookstores that Kobo partners with through the American Booksellers Association.

A Kobo spokesman told me that last year, the company’s “top priority” was to “meet the demand of holiday shoppers around the world. As such, we paid close attention to our distribution channels to ensure that our retail partners were fully stocked for the busy buying season.We established a distribution process that runs very well, and were very happy with our end-of-year results, with Kobo’s E Ink eReader sales up nearly 150 percent in December. To further expand on our offerings and to provide customers with another place to purchase we are now offering our world-class devices and accessories through Kobo.com.”

Kobo says it has 13 million readers worldwide. The company launched in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands in 2012 and plans to head to Russia, India and China in 2013. In the United States, its share of the ebook market is small and lags behind Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

An earlier version of this article implied that Kobo had begun selling devices through its website for the first time. In fact, The Digital Reader notes that the company had once sold devices on its website, stopped last year and has now started to do so again.

The piece was updated with a comment from Kobo on Tuesday afternoon.

At paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City, we’ll be exploring how book publishers are adapting their business models for a digital age and rolling out new products designed to take advantage of e-readers, tablets and smartphones. I’ll be interviewing executives from three publishers handling the transition in particularly interesting ways: Dominique Raccah, the publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks; Rachel Chou, the chief marketing officer at Open Road Media; and Evan Ratliff, founder and CEO of Atavist. Here’s a peek at some of the issues we’ll be discussing.

• New payment models: Last spring, Sourcebooks rolled out a romance ebook club, Discover a New Love, that gives members DRM-free ebooks, discounts and access to special events for $9.99 every six months. And Atavist is now offering in-app subscriptions to its e-singles. I’ll be asking Raccah and Ratliff what they’ve learned about their readers and pricing and tips on how other publishers can enact subscription models.
• The enhanced ebook now: Enhanced ebooks got a bad rap a few years ago, when it was uncertain whether readers would pay more for an ebook that included a few videos and photos. But with the increased adoption of tablets and cheaper technology, publishers are finding new ways to integrate digital media into their books. I’ll be asking our panelists about their best practices in this area: How do they decide which bells and whistles to add and which to avoid, and when’s it best to just go with straight text?
• New frontiers of marketing: “Discoverability” is the buzzword on lots of publishers’ lips, but how does it translate into practice — and is it actually a problem for readers? Raccah, Ratliff and Chou will speak about the ways that they are marketing their books online and how they’re working with retailers to promote their titles.

Let me know what else you want to talk about! Sign up to attend the paidContent Live conference on April 17 in NYC here, and in the comments of this post, I’d love to hear your burning digital book publishing questions.

The offer applies at Barnes & Noble retail and college stores, online, and third-party retailers Walmart, Best Buy and Target. The Nook HD+ tablet, which has a 9-inch screen and is Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, is $269 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB model. The Nook Simple Touch is normally $79.

Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Nook Media (the spinoff of Barnes & Noble’s digital and college businesses, which was completed in October and includes investments from Microsoft and Pearson), said in a statement that the two-for-one deal lets customers “fully experience all that the expansive Nook Store of more than 3 million titles has to offer.” The idea is that tablet users who are coming to the Nook HD+ for its “movies, apps, magazines and more” — though it’s unclear how many people actually want these things from Nook, especially following the launch of the iPad Mini) — might stick around and buy some ebooks if they have a device to do so. (Of course, they can also read ebooks on a Nook Tablet.)

The deal might just be intended to get rid of Nook e-readers — it’s possible that Barnes & Noble wants to focus on the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight going forward. It may also be Barnes & Noble’s effort to compete with Amazon, which recently slashed the price of the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, bringing the WiFi versions price in line with the Nook HD+.

Book group iPad app that supports Kindle

A bunch of my girlfriends and I are about to start a virtual book club to read Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. We’ll be reading it on our respective devices and then talking about it together on a private message board.

Most of us will be buying the Kindle version of the book, and I wish there were an iPad app that let us open the Kindle file within it and then create our own private conversation around the book — highlights, notes and so on. There are already plenty of social reading iPad apps — Readmill, Subtext, Copia — but they either don’t support Kindle books and/or don’t let users create a private discussion.

If you’re wondering why it has to be Kindle, by the way: It’s the device/format that all of my friends already use. That’s going to be true for a lot of book groups, and so it seems as if any book club app is going to have to support books bought on Kindle.

Interim solution: We’ll be reading the book on respective devices or in print, and then we’ll talk about it together on a private message board.

E-ink mode for iPad

I like to read ebooks on my iPad before I go to bed, but I worry that the back-lit screen messes with my eyes and sleep patterns. I wish there were an e-ink mode or a filter app that changed the type of light coming from the iPad screen — not just a dimmer but something that actually made it look more similar to an e-ink screen, with no glare. Apple actually has a patent on this type of hybrid display, so it might be a feature we see on an iPad one day.

Interim solution: The app F.lux changes a screen’s brightness and tint based on the time of day.

A Web-based Calibre

Calibre is free ebook management software: You can use it to store your ebook collection, convert ebooks to other formats, send ebooks to e-readers, download content from news sites and turn it into an ebook, and so on. There are also a number of third-party plugins that add new features to the service. For example, there are Calibre plugins that break the DRM on an ebook. That means that, for example, you can buy an ebook from Barnes & Noble, break the DRM on it, convert it to a *.mobi file and read it on your Kindle. (That isn’t what publishers or retailers want you to do, but with Calibre third-party plugins it’s possible.)

Calibre is downloadable software, but I’d love to see a web version that lets readers store all their ebooks in the cloud, convert them directly within a web browser and then email them straight to a device. That way, users could access their files from anywhere.

Interim solution: With a couple hacks, you can sync Calibre with Dropbox. That’ll let you access all your ebooks where you have Dropbox installed, but you won’t be able to convert them to other formats. Also, be warned that it looks as if Dropbox has cracked down on this in at least a few cases.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk 

An ebookstore with about 300,000 German-language titles is accessible from the device. Users can also shop for ebooks from the individual booksellers’ websites. (By contrast, the German Kindle store contains about 150,000 German-language ebooks.) The Shine supports EPUB, PDF and TXT files. The Telekom cloud provides users with unlimited storage of ebooks they purchase from the partners, and 25 GB of storage for ebooks bought from other retailers.  The telecommunications provider also has over 11,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots in Germany.

The German tech industry body BITKOM estimated last fall that 800,000 e-readers were sold in Germany in 2012, and it expects that to rise to 1.4 million units in 2013. Today’s press release announcing the new device also says that about 11 percent of Germans read ebooks on mobile devices.

The companies involved in the deal suggest that, while Amazon is too large a competitor for any one of them to go up against, by banding together they have a better chance. In the press release, Thalia CEO Michael Busch describes such a partnership as “unseen before” and says: “Every company has to consider its strategic approach and interests and choose the partners that will serve these interests best in order to compete with the mighty U.S. online retailer giants.”*

“The aim of the partnership is to create a competitive, single internet platform for digital products, especially for digital reading,” Weltbild’s Carol Haff told German book trade publication Buchreport.

*I relied primarily on Google Translate and also received assistance from a couple of German speakers.

This story was updated several times Friday morning as more information became available.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, released Tuesday. “After five years, ebooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just five percent.”

That’s impressive growth, but as the ebook transition moves forward, Amazon should worry that Kindle is not going to be the device leading the revolution. Apple and iPad will cut into its growth.

Amazon has mastered the art of the press release that doesn’t say much. Several data points are missing from Bezos’s statement — here are some questions I have:

• What’s Amazon’s actual ebook revenue? The company’s worldwide media sales were $19.9 billion in 2012; what percentage of that came from ebooks, and what percentage came from print books?
• What was print book growth for the entire year — and for past years? Bezos refers to annual ebook sales, but print book sales for just one month. Print books are also starting from a much larger base; they make up over 70 percent of trade book sales in the U.S.
• Which ebook categories are growing the fastest?
• Where’s the ebook growth coming from? 70 percent growth is a lot. Is most of it coming from within the U.S. or internationally? And is it coming from owners of Amazon devices — Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets — or is it coming from iPad and other tablet owners reading ebooks with Kindle apps?

Amazon’s not going to answer those questions (though I did ask them), but they’re important in part because U.S. book publishers are reporting slowing sales of adult ebooks: What was once triple-digit growth has fallen to the double digits. The revolution has also been largely limited to text-based titles — adult fiction and nonfiction — and categories like cookbooks and travel haven’t seen nearly as much growth from ebooks.

If the digital market for certain kinds of books is settling, as it appears to be, Amazon will have to find growth in other areas (though it doesn’t have to, and likely can’t, sustain 70 percent ebook growth for long). The company can expand Kindle internationally, as it’s been doing already, and it can still grab a certain number of ebook newbies.

Eventually, though, Amazon will have to tackle the genres that have remained rooted in print — children’s books and heavily illustrated books like cookbooks, coffee-table books and the huge textbook market. The company clearly sees potential on the children’s front: It’s launched new children’s book imprints and offerings like Kindle Free Time Unlimited. And Kindle Format 8 supports HTML5 and illustrated content.

But the biggest company it has to compete with in this area is Apple. Publishers of heavily illustrated content — both traditional publishers and digital-focused startups — are likely to focus on developing for iPad first, since it’s by far the most popular tablet. The next five years of the ebook revolution are not going to look like the first five.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Stacie Stauff Smith Photography 

The WSJ notes that “the chain shut an average of about 15 stores a year in the past decade, but until 2009 it also was opening 30 or more a year,” with a peak of 726 stores in 2008. Klipper may have chosen to talk to the WSJ to show investors that the company has a plan. He said that fewer than 20 of the chain’s retail stores are unprofitable, and “we’re going to be around a long time” because consumers read both print and ebooks (this is a point that the company has been pressing for awhile, based on its own research).

Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating noticed that the chain’s store closure plan hasn’t changed and said, “It should be noted that in 2012, Barnes & Noble opened two new prototype stores and in 2013 plans to test several other prototypes, as well. Barnes & Noble has great real estate in prime locations and the company’s management is fully committed to the retail concept for the long term.”

Barnes & Noble is threatened by the shift to online book shopping at Amazon. The company has rolled out a host of Nook e-readers and tablets that face stiff competition in a market dominated by Kindle e-readers and saturated with cheap tablets from Amazon, Google, Apple and others. Barnes & Noble just delivered a terrible holiday earnings report, showing Nook, BN.com and retail sales all down, with a particularly large decline in Nook device sales. The company plans to spin off the Nook and college stores into a separate unit called Nook Media, with Microsoft and Pearson both holding stakes.

When Borders, then the nation’s second-largest bookstore chain, went bankrupt and liquidated all its stores in 2011, it seemed as if it could be good news for Barnes & Noble, which would have a chance to grab former Borders customers. But it appears that former Borders customers largely switched their book buying over to Amazon.

Amazon already uses IVONA technology on the Kindle Fire, using the software to, for example, read user actions aloud or help navigate the touchscreen. Amazon might now integrate some of these features into its e-readers. (The Kindle Paperwhite lacks the experimental text-to-speech feature that was available on the older Kindle Touch.)

Over the past few years, various advocacy organizations for blind people — most prominently, the National Federation for the Blind — have sued or protested against Amazon’s attempts to sign deals with school districts and universities to bring Kindle devices into classrooms. The organizations argue that Kindle e-readers and ebooks are inaccessible to blind students and are thus prohibited from use in public schools by federal law. More recently, advocacy by the National Federation for the Blind might have helped scuttle a multi-million dollar deal between Amazon and the U.S. State Department that would have provided Kindles to overseas learning programs. If Amazon is able to integrate text-to-speech technology into more of its devices, the company might be able to avoid some legal hassles.

Of course, IVONA’s technology could also help Amazon create a competitor to Apple’s Siri voice-recognition technology. (Rumors that Amazon is working on a smartphone have been making their way around the internet for awhile.) It seems more likely, though, that the primary driver of this acquisition is Amazon’s desire to avoid future lawsuits — and to get Kindles into more hands worldwide.