Last week, Barnes & Noble announced it would begin experimenting with bundling print and eBooks together, an idea this blogger wholly endorses.

Why not bundle print and eBooks together? Obviously, publishers will say that means selling one product when the could be selling two. But for the music industry, offering a download coupon for a new album--especially for mail order customers and vinyl lovers--has kept fans loyal to record labels and buying hard copies of records. The idea of print and eBook bundling is in line with Amazon and other device and app makers' notion that one should be able to read a book on whatever screen one has on hand.

Aren't there books you would love to have in both eBook and print editions, reading the big old print book at home, and taking the eBook with you on your iPhone or eReader. Might you even be willing to pay, say, four or five bucks more to get both together? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

Princeton didn't actually give the Kindle a grade, but the university did participate in a pilot program through which it gave participating students and professors a Kindle DX in exchange for a report on how they used the device in their academic lives. According to a university press release, the program shows that "e-Readers must be significantly improved to have the same value in a teaching environment as traditional paper texts."

The results were predictably mixed. Most interesting is that students reported cutting down on their paper use by 50%, uploading readings to the Kindle instead. On the flip side, they made the usual complaints about being unable to highlight or take notes properly or to easily flip back and forth through pages.

Around 65% of those who participated in the study said they would not buy another eReader if theirs broke, though many also expressed interest in seeing future incarnations of eReader devices.

[Via eSchoolNews]

Edelweiss, the digital catalog provider owned by Above the Treeline and which debuted at last year's Book Expo America (BEA) has announced a new partnership with BEA to create "Books@BEA," a digital catalog of all the books on exhibition at the conference.

In a release, Steve Rosato, Event Director for BEA, said, "We're thrilled to debut Books@BEA because it's yet another added value to both attendees and exhibitors and demonstrates BEA's commitment to keeping pace with the evolution of the industry."

Participation in the catalog is open to all publishers exhibiting their books at the show, but excludes backlist titles. The catalog will also be free to readers, who will have to register to see it.

This year's BEA will be held at the Javits Center in New York City on May 25-27, 2010. Publishers interested in participating in Books@BEA can contact Mike Carlucci at mcarlucci@reedexpo.com.

The Kindle Web browser sucks. According to Pocket Lint, there is hope, however. Dim hope, but hope nonetheless.

The tech blog sites a job listing (which it in turn heard about from Webmonkey.com) at Amazon's in-house consumer products division, Labs126, which is looking for a software engineer whose job it will be to maintain an innovate an "Embedded Web Browser." This listing says nothing about the Kindle, but it's likely--especially given Kindle's shoddy browser--that that's what the listing is referring to.

One can't extrapolate too much from a hazy listing like this, but if Amazon wants to keep up with its competitors, especially Apple, it's going to have to add some bells and whistles to the next Kindle, and a real browser (and continued free 3G?) might be a nice place to start.

By now you've probably heard about poor Charles Pellegrino, author of 'The Last Train From Hiroshima,' about those who fled the bombing of Nagasaki only arrive in Hiroshima just in time for the second bomb to drop. The revelation that Pellegrino--a scholar, author of several other books, and consultant on films--had been duped by one of his major sources cast doubt on other facts in the book, causing Holt to cease production and sale of the book shortly after publication.

Yesterday, Mokoto Rich ran a lengthy piece in The New York Times recounting the whole saga in detail along with some new interviewing with the author, his agent, and his editor. Of interest to eBookNewser, though, is the fact that, while Holt wants to wash its hands of the book, Pellegrino told The Times he still hopes to published a corrected edition of his book, either as a paperback or eBook.

Here's what Rich says on the matter after an interview with the author (there's something precious and awful about seeing this guy frustrated): "although agitated, [Pellegrino] seemed to believe he could still find a publisher to help him release a corrected electronic or paperback edition.

Or he could do it himself on Scribd or Smashwords, in case the publishers aren't lining up. In fact, Mr. Pellegrino, check out eBookNewser's series, The Making of an eBook, to find out how.

I had a friend back in the mid-'90s who was too excited to show me how great Jurassic Park looked on his dad's new laser disk player. Well, today Spielberg's classic is on eBay for about $5 in that format. (No need to rush; it looks like the bidding is wide open.) And that's pretty much how it goes in the world of technology: coveted today, chucked tomorrow.

Lance Ulanoff, EIC of PCMag.com says the eReader market is no different. "Even what we know right now is going to change in a year's time, which means that this transformative product that we just got our hands on in the last 18 months is already being pushed aside for the next transformative product."

And, like iTunes before it, not everyone is pleased with Amazon's pricing for eBooks. Ulanoff recalls one bestselling author who sorta grimaced when asked about having his titles on the Kindle.

Part 1: Media Beat: Lance Ulanoff Says iPad Won't Save Publishing Industry

Part 3: Wednesday, tune in to our sister blog FishbowlNY as Ulanoff discusses PCMag.com's transition online and how the longstanding publication is faring in the increasingly crowded tech sector.

Media Beat is mediabistro.com's interview series with the movers and shakers of the media world. View all past episodes at MediaBeat.com.

Yesterday TechCruch ran a speculative article wondering if--after trimming sexually explicit and a few other apps from the App store--Apple would hack into the 27,000 available eBooks in advance of the release of iBooks. The story is perhaps a bit alarmist, maybe even a little dangerous, though the author makes clear near the beginning that "I should make it clear that I haven't heard anything about Apple removing the myriad book apps from the App Store."

But the recent App Store pruning does raise a question about how open Apple will let iBooks be. Will it be as wild and wooly as Amazon's Kindle store, where there are tens of thousands of books no one would want, but which are there in case someday someone wants one?

Apple's obsession with secrecy and control does make it a slightly nerve-wracking company to oversee the dissemination of eBooks. Though it seems unlikely the company will start dumping eBooks from its App store--that might make Apple unpopular.

Starting with Sony Reader, and then moving on to Kindle and Nook, The New York Times will soon offer a "disaggregated" digital version of the paper's Book Review for eReaders. Will you read it?

Times marketing director James Dunn spoke with Bill Mitchell from Poynter about the initiative. A full Kindle subscription to the Times currently costs, $13.99 a month, a steep price for readers who only want to read book reviews.

We like the idea. Using the magic of Scribd last week, we created a monthly print(out) version of GalleyCat Reviews that you can download for printing, eReaders, or mobile devices.

Here's more from the article: "Mitchell reports the Times will introduce a separate version of its Book Review for three e-reader platforms, beginning with the Sony e-reader in the next couple of weeks. Versions for Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook will follow. Dunn declined to say what the price will be for the Book Review on these platforms ... Dunn told Mitchell that examples such as The New York Times Crossword and Book Review were 'low hanging fruit' for disaggregation." (Via Mike Cane)

HarperCollins has created an enhanced eBook app of Hillery Mantel's Wolf Hall, as well as a free sampler app. It's your typical enhanced app deal--the full book, video interviews, all that stuff, reports The Bookseller. It seems to not be available in the US, but is out in England.

On Twitter, Digital Book World points out something funny about the app: it costs 6.99 pounds, which is only a bit more than the $9.99 everyone is fighting so hard to get Amazon to increase.

A bit of a contradiction, no? Maybe it's different over there in Britain?

According to a study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University, giving away free eBooks leads to a short-term increase in sales for the print versions of those books. The study's authors monitored 41 print books in the 8 weeks before and after the givaways.

According to Wired, here's what they found: "data showed that giving the books away resulted in higher print sales in the eight weeks following the giveaway than during the same time period preceding it for fiction (a 26 percent increase), non-fiction (5 percent) and Random House releases (9 percent)."

So publishers, start giving away those eBooks! Click here for the full report from the Study.

Fair enough--publishers want flexibility on eBook pricing and don't want to be locked into Amazon's $9.99, but $31.19 is pushing it, don't you think? That's how much Amazon is charging for Imperial, William Vollmann's 1300 page tome about an embattled county in California. It's only $3 less than Amazon's $34.65 price for the hardcover.

Obviously, the print edition is a big book that must cost more than usual to print, bind, and ship, but can a publisher really justify $20 more for a few more KB of file?

What do you think? Would you ever buy a $31 Kindle book?

The US will get the Wifi iPad first, on April 3, but, according to Publishing Perspectives, it will be released internationally in late April. iPad pricing will be announced in April for Germany, Australia, France, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Canada, Switzerland and Spain. And iBooks will go live in Germany later this year.

This article from The Bookseller offers a bit more detail about British anticipation of the iPad.