If you bought a Playbook when they went on sale earlier this week, you might want to send it back. A leak at one of RIMs Canadian partners suggests that the Playbook has been retired.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.

Digital children’s publisher TouchyBooks is relaunching its bookstore app. The PlayTales Book store app is available in iTunes and through the Android Marketplace. The first version of the app has already been downloaded more than a million times.

The update for the app includes interactive games and adds Chinese and Japanese eBooks to the existing titles in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. New interactive titles will include versions of The Little Mermaid, The Beauty and the Beast and The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.

And on February 7th, UNICEF will be launching a book via PlayTales called Give A Day. The eBook will feature English and Spanish narrations by Lakers basketball star Pau Gasol. Proceeds of the book will be donated to UNICEF.

Rumors are going around that Amazon is going to launch a bricks-and-mortar store that would compete with the likes of Target, Walmart and Costco.

But would the competitive advantage be? Amazon’s business model is based on providing inventory on every kind of random product that you could imagine and delivering it within days. They certainly wouldn’t be able to keep this kind of inventory on hand in stores.

In addition, while much of Amazon’s business is still from print books, DVDs and CDs, the company is banking on the proliferation of digital media, which is why they are focusing so much on the Kindle and Kindle Fire and selling these devices at such low prices. Why would it make sense to open a physical store to sell digital items? Perhaps to compete with Barnes & Noble’s Nook business, which is known to have better customer service than Amazon because of in-store offerings. Read more

Out of all of Apple’s products, Siri is the most visible and definitely the coolest at the moment. You can tell that Apple put lots of work into getting Siri to understand virtually anything you could say. Well, almost anything.

Some Scottish iPhone 4S customers are having trouble with Siri. As you can see in the video above, Siri cannot understand basic English, not even when it is set for English (UK).

PUBSLUSH, the online social networking site that works like Kickstarter for books, is running a writing competition.

Aspiring writers can enter “the best 10 pages” of their manuscripts for the chance to be published through and featured on PUBSLUSH.com, as well as $1,000 in prize money.

The competition is open to all genres including: Biography, chick lit, children’s, comedy, fantasy, history, horror, mystery and crime, poetry compilations, politics, religion, romance, sci-fi, self-help, teen and thriller. Entries will be accepted through March 31st.

Here is more from the PUBSLUSH site: “Manuscript samples will be judged on style, content and commercial viability. Judges will look for writing that is clear, articulate and logically organized. Winning manuscript must demonstrate an outstanding writing ability and represent the genre submitted.”

iBooks continues to lead as the most popular free app in the Apple App Store this week, according to Apple. Kindle is the second most popular free book app in iTunes. Grimm’s Red Riding Hood & Goodreads both join the list this week.

Explore these 20 free apps and find out what kind of literary apps succeed in this crowded marketplace. As part of Mediabistro’s Publishing App Expo which happened last month, we spotlight the top grossing book apps, the top paid Android books apps and the most popular free apps every week. Follow this link to check read our coverage from the event.

Below, we’ve listed the top free iOS apps of the week–linking to iTunes so that you can check out the apps. Read more

Amazon still hasn’t released the Kindle Fire outside the US, in spite of the many interested potential customers. Luckily for the desperate KF lover, 3rd party sellers have stepped up to fill the need.

Right now you can find a small number of Kindle Fires on QoQa.fr. This is a daily deals site similar to Woot, and they have sold eReaders at least once in the past.

They’re asking €199 for this 7″ Android tablet, and that converts to about $261 USD. That’s more than the retail price in the US, but it is not a whole lot more than it would cost if I were to buy and ship the KF to France for a friend.

Do you know of any other companies selling the KF or other US-only eReaders? I’d like to hear about them.

QoQa.fr via eBouquin

The classic Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles is our free ebook today. It was originally published in 1902.

The most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles features the phantom dog of Dartmoor, which, according to an ancient legend, has haunted the Baskervilles for generations. When Sir Charles Baskerville dies suddenly of a heart attack on the grounds of the family’s estate, the locals are convinced that the spectral hound is responsible, and Holmes is called in.

This title caught my eye because it was recently adapted for television. The BBC has recently finished showing Sherlock, a new interpretation of Conan Doyle’s work, and The Hound of the Baskervilles was used to inspire the second of 3 episodes.

You can find today’s eBook on FeedBooks.

P.S. The other 2 episodes, in case you are curious, were inspired by A Scandal in Bohemia and The Final Problem.

The NYT Company released their year end financial statement today, and the news was mixed.

The per-share earnings dipped slightly from that of 2010, and the operating profit also dropped by about $5 million, to bout $106 million. For the full year, the company reported a net loss of $40 million, compared with a profit of $108 million in 2010.

But there was one bright spot in the news today, and that was their ongoing efforts to charge for digital content. The paper of record launched a controversial paywall in mid-2011, and it looks like their efforts might be paying off.

“In the second half of the year, our digital initiatives also included the launch of the new pay site, BostonGlobe.com, and digital subscription packages at the International Herald Tribune. As of quarter end, paid subscribers to all of the Company’s digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled about 406,000,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and chief executive officer, The New York Times Company.

Digital advertising revenue was up 5%  in the last quarter, and digital subscription revenue was up 4.7% as well.

image by Robert Scoble

It looks like South Carolina isn’t the only state who is getting into a tussle with Amazon today. According to Amazon’s recent FTC filings, the state of Arizona wants Amazon to hand over all the state sales taxes that they hadn’t been collection since 2006.

“The State of Arizona is alleging that we should have collected a transaction tax that is similar to a sales tax on applicable transactions during those years,” Amazon said in its annual 10-K regulatory filing. “We believe that the assessment is without merit and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter.”

This collection notice is similar to the one that Texas attempted to collect last year, only in that case Texas caved on the estimated $269 million in unpaid taxes. Arizona sent the bill over in November, and it includes both the unpaid tax as well as interest. They indicted that Amazon could pay by credit card or in small bills.

There’s one detail about this story that, once you know about it, is going to eat away at you. How would the state of Arizona know that the bill should be $4453 million, and not $63 million (or some other figure)? I don’t believe Amazon is required to disclose earnings by state, so that $53 million bill is likely only a guesstimate of the true cost.

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image by dherrera_96