About the third-gen, OLCP founder Nicholas Negroponte says he is aspiring toward “a single sheet, completely plastic and unbreakable, waterproof, 1/4" thick, full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes. 1W. $75, ready in 2012.”

I can see the logic here. Microsoft is apparently coming out with a twin-screen tablet, and while it’s for a different market, OLPC would prefer to lead the pack. Not only that, imagine the boost that the new design could give e-reading not just in developing countries, but also here in the United States.

In related news from the Xconomy article, the International Telecommunications Union is working with OLPC and others toward high-speed Net service for half the people on earth by 2015. Hmm. Does that include Comcast subscribers during peak periods?

Black Friday is officially the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday is the first Monday after BF.

Related: Internetnews and Techmeme roundup on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Beyond more formats, Foxit now includes the ability to organize your book into folders—and you can use the new virtual keyboard to type out names. Foxit has also added bookmarket.

Existing users will be able to upgrade..

Related: News release, Gearlog, Engadget and MobileRead.

Remember, Roger Sperberg is pretty excited about resolution in the new Android devices.

But how about e-book software for Android, the Droid’s OS?  Art of War looks pretty promising from afar, based on features, and I intend to catch up with it in person. Anyone have some first-hand experiences to report with Art of War? Web site here. Going by the Android Market at least, this one appears to be the most popular e-book-reading app for Android-OS hardware.

Meanwhile I’m also curious what the Stanza guys are up to, and whether Amazon might port over Stanza, rather than the existing iPhone app, to display Kindle books on Android-OS machines. Probably not. But it sure would be fun if that happened. Just don’t take away ePub capabilities, please.

Detail: The Droid’s browser is said to be great with full pages.

Related: WordPlayer Art of War, top free app in the Android Market, can read ePub: Other apps discussed., plus a Techmeme roudup on the Verizon launch yesterday.

Downloads are here; release notes, here; Techmeme roundup here.

No great news, except that the Judge set November 9 as the date for the parties to submit the revised settlement agreement.

According to FierceWierless, Amazon announced this at a conference in San Francisco today. They said that it would be too confusing to sell two versions of the Kindle, one for the US and one for international use, and so they decided to go completely GSM and use AT&T as their new carrier. They will continue to use Sprint for the Kindle DX and will also continue to support the Sprint devices already in use.

Thanks to the Kindle Chronicles for the link.

I’ll be there and will report back on Sunday with any items of interest.

This was the central point of a debate about the fate of educational institutions’ brick-and-mortar libraries at the 2009 Educause Conference in Denver, as reported by Inside Higher Ed.

Despite the objections of “a minority of very loud faculty members,” (Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University) said, the days of wandering through the stacks are over. “People,” she told the audience, of whom many were librarians, “the world has changed, and so have your students, and so have your faculty!”

Though some centered on the need for a physical presence, others discussed how the physical space could morph to accommodate the changing of the times.  This parallels discussions being held across the country (and in other posts here) on the future of the very concept of the public library.

Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good.

The discussion highlighted the changes to publishing and text use that the digital age has wrought, and the fact that existing copyright law does not address those modern concerns.

My wife and kids pre-ordered a nook for my birthday at our local B&N. The sales person also sold her a $100 gift card to “get my eBook collection started”. When I tried to purchase a few books, I found out that gift cards can’t be used on eBooks. How many people are going to get a nook and a gift card this Christmas only to find out they are void when it comes to eBooks.

Now that is really very strange. I suspect there will be a lot of angry customers around Christmas!

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Nintendo, in its last earnings call, stated that competition from the iPhone was one of the reasons its profits fell by half in the last quarter and Flurry feels that this is some indication of what the iPhone could do to Amazon. Amazon, however, has its own iPhone app and I don’t know, and Flurry doesn’t mention, how this could play into the equation. It could very well be that having the ability to read the same book on both the iPhone and the Kindle could increase, rather than decrease, Amazon’s share. Also, the 1% figure is probably a bit low, since Amazon only has 1 app, but many people are probably using it, like me, to read their Kindle books.