If it’s a cheap tablet you’re after, Barnes & Noble and Amazon want your business. Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nook Tablet both look promising on paper—the former with its suite of Amazon services, and latter with its superior specs and more diverse streaming video offerings—but chances are, you’ve only got room for one tablet on your holiday wish list.

As is often the case with gadgets, finding the best 7-inch tablet is a matter of figuring out your personal needs. Below, I’ll divvy up the strengths of the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire so you can figure out what’s most important.

Apps

The Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire both have app stores, but Amazon’s tablet has a bigger selection. Its gaming library, in particular, is much more diverse, with categories for RPGs, strategy games, shooters and more, whereas the Nook focuses mostly on lighter fare. The Amazon Appstore also offers more free apps, and gives away one paid app every day.

Advantage: Kindle Fire

Streaming Media

Netflix is integrated with the Nook Tablet, pushing recommendations to the user’s home screen, and Hulu Plus is pre-loaded, making Barnes & Noble’s tablet a strong streaming video device. Although the Kindle Fire has its own streaming video service through Amazon Prime, it’s only ideal for people who already subscribe to the $79-per-year service for something else, be it the limited book rental library or free two-day shipping. For everyone else, the Nook Tablet’s video services have a better selection and wider availability on other devices, such as smartphones and game consoles. Streaming music is a toss-up, with both tablets offering apps for Pandora, MOG and Rhapsody. (UPDATE: The Kindle Fire will be getting a Netflix app at launch. I’m still giving the edge to the Nook Tablet for now for its Hulu Plus support.)

Advantage: Nook Tablet

Reading

The Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet hit all the same feature checkboxes for e-reading. Both devices offer millions of e-books, plus newspapers and magazines. For parents, the Nook Tablet gets a slight edge for its “Read and Record” capability, which lets you record your own story narrations, but Amazon Prime members will prefer the Kindle Fire for its selection of free e-book rentals. Comic book fans will be divided; the Nook Tablet will have graphic novels from Marvel, while the Kindle Fire has a deal with DC.

Advantage: Toss-Up

On-Demand Media

No contest here. The Kindle Fire will let you purchase or rent videos on demand, and includes access to Amazon’s MP3 store. Best of all, any content you purchase from Amazon is stored online for free, so you won’t have to worry about wasting storage space on the device. The Nook Tablet doesn’t have a way to let you buy music and video on the device, so you’ll have to bring your own content from elsewhere.

Advantage: Kindle Fire

Straight-Up Specs
Although the Nook Tablet is $50 more expensive than the Kindle Fire, you get your money’s worth in raw power. Barnes & Noble’s slate has twice the RAM at 1 GB and twice the built in storage at 16 GB, plus a microSD card slot for even more storage. Otherwise, the two tablets have similar specs, including dual-core processors and 7-inch, 1024-by-600 resolution displays. If you plan to hack either tablet to run a pure version of Android, the Nook Tablet’s extra RAM will be worth the extra scratch, but either way, its generous storage will come in handy.

Advantage: Nook Tablet

Little Details and Intangibles

Specs and features only go so far. Both tablets look good on paper, but either one could be buggy, laggy, unresponsive or otherwise broken at launch. And although Barnes & Noble brags about how the Nook Tablet is lighter than Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the two have very similar proportions, so the difference really comes down to how each one feels in your hands.

Barnes & Noble has one more advantage in its ability to offer free support, free Wi-Fi and special offers for Nook Tablet owners at its retail stores. Amazon, meanwhile, plays to its own strength in web services. The Kindle Fire offers free cloud storage for purchased content, and includes a web browser called Silk that taps Amazon’s web servers to load pages faster. I’m not going to pick a winner or categorically declare one tablet better than the other—at least not until I’ve tried both of them in finished form.

[This post republished from Techland.]

Surprisingly, it took two booksellers / digital content companies to figure out there’s a market for smaller, less expensive tablets that focus on key consumer activities. The Fire and Nook may not be computer replacements, but for most people, neither is the iPad, yet it’s easily outselling comparable Android tablets by a large margin according to the limited data available.

Today, B&N announced another new Nook–and this one, it appears, is meant to take the Kindle on more squarely than either of its predecessors.It’s $139 (matching the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle, but not the ad-supported one). It looks like a Kindle, with a gray case and 6″ E Ink screen (and no color touchscreen strip, the most striking feature of the original Nook). It stresses great battery life–in fact, Barnes & Noble is claiming two months on a charge, vs. one month for the Kindle.

Unlike the Kindle, the new Nook has a touch-enabled screen, which lets it shrink the size of the keyboard by ditching the Kindle’s physical keyboard. B&N says it weighs under 8 ounces, compared to 8.5 ounces for the Kindle. And the company says that the E Ink display has 80 percent smoother page turns and less of the annoying flashing effect when you flip a page compared to  ”other eReaders”–which, I suspect, includes the Kindle.

The new Nook has some of the features of its pricier color brother, including the Nook Friends social-networking and book-sharing tools. But it doesn’t appear to have an app store (and it runs Android 2.1, an old version of the OS–Android is presumably just plumbing on this reader, not a point in its favor).

Barnes & Noble is calling this Nook “The Simple Touch Reader,” which stresses one Kindle-like feature (simplicity) and one potential advantage over the Kindle (touch). Until now, the biggest single advantage the Kindle has had over the Nooks has been that simplicity–the degree to which the device, in Jeff Bezos’s words, disappears in your hands. Matching it will be no cakewalk–as evidenced by the earlier Nooks and all the other non-Amazon e-readers that aren’t as pleasingly minimalist–so I’m really curious to try the new Nook and see how B&N did.

The reader ships on June 10th, and is available for preorder now.

Of course, Barnes & Noble has never pitched the Nook Color as an iPad killer. It calls it a “reader’s tablet,” and it gave the device a modified version of Android that doesn’t have the standard Android interface or access to the Android Marketplace. It’s Amazon.com’s cheaper, E-Ink-sporting Kindle that’s been in B&N’s crosshairs.

But when the company released the Nook Color last year, it did say it was working on an app marketplace of its own–a move that would make the Nook Color a little less of a dedicated e-reader and a little more of a general-purpose device. (Already, some geeky buyers had rooted their Nooks to turn them into standard Android tablets.) Today, B&N is launching that marketplace–which is a new section in the shopping area where it already sells books and magazines–as part of the Nook Color’s version 1.2 upgrade. And while it’s sticking with the “reader’s tablet” idea and saying it’ll focus on reading materials and complementary items, it’s also saying that it’s listened to consumers who think that a $249 Nook Color has a place as an alternative to pricier, more powerful tablets.

Barnes & Noble gave me a demo of the new software last week. It’s making it available starting today at www.nookcolor.com/update; you can download it to a Windows PC or Mac and then transfer it to the Nook Color. The company plans to push it out as an over-the-air update directly to Nook Colors themselves over Wi-Fi starting next week.

The new “Nook Apps” feature is launching with 125 programs, including–first things first–Angry Birds, as well as the Pulse newsreader, MyCast Weather, a painting program called Drawing Pad, and Uno. There’s a decided emphasis on reading: other apps are based on Dr. Seuss books, Epicurious, and Lonely Planet Phrasebooks. Some programs are free, and B&N says around half are $2.99 or less.

The company plans to add more apps at a steady pace, though it won’t approve everything and says it wants to preserve the emphasis on word-oriented activities; the Nook Color’s version of Android is now based on version 2.2 Froyo, and B&N says that developers should be able to make most programs that work with Froyo work on the Nook Color without much trouble. (Normally, at this point I’d complain about this device being stuck with the aging Froyo rather than Android 3.0 Honeycomb, but that seems beside the point: the Nook Color sports its own reading-centric user interface and wouldn’t look like a Honeycomb tablet even if Honeycomb was in there.)

Beyond Nook Apps, there’s quite a bit more in the 1.2 upgrade that both rounds out the tablet’s capabilities and improves the reading experience, including:

An e-mail client. It supports multiple POP3 and Webmail clients, but not Exchange (B&N says that’s in the works).

Rich-media books. Some titles now incorporate video (similar to a feature Amazon rolled into its iPhone and iPad Kindle apps last year). Children’s books already had a read-to-me feature in some cases; now some titles include interactivity, such as animations that are triggered when you tap on the illustrations.

Nook Friends. This expansion of the Lend Me feature turns it into a social network that allows Nook users to share books, reviews, and notes.

Improved browsing. Barnes & Noble says that the Web browser–a weak spot in the original Nook Color software–is now faster, with better gesture support and the ability to switch between mobile and full versions of sites. It also supports Flash Player 10.1, which didn’t crash during the demo I saw. (Yes, I know that’s the most lukewarm endorsement possible, but I’m not going to judge Flash until I’ve tried it–and if it works well it’ll be a very pleasant surprise.)

B&N says that over two million books and 150 magazines and newspapers are available on the Nook Color. Magazines are in a full-color form that provides the print layouts along with a Readability-like text view.

I’ve only seen the new Nookcolor software in demos by a Barnes & Noble employee, not given it a hands-on test myself. (I hope to do that today.) I hope it’s more polished than the tablet’s original, rough-around-the-edges software. And it’s not clear just how big and how good the supply of Nook Apps will get. (Will it have a thousand apps people will care about someday? Ten thousand?)

But with its low price and bookish focus, the Nookcolor is already something that the Motorola Xoom and BlackBerry PlayBook aren’t: an iPad alternative with a coherent, fully-baked answer to the question “Why would I buy this instead of an iPad?” It’s also less like its leading e-reader competitor, Amazon’s Kindle, than ever–I suspect that most folks who compare the minimalist, monochrome, battery-sipping $139 Kindle to the more complex, versatile, power-hungry, and colorful $249 Nook will immediately gravitate towards one over the other.

So Apple is suing Samsung, accusing it of imitating Apple products with its Galaxy phones and tablets. The most startling thing about the news may be that the two companies weren’t already in court with each other. Over the past few years, the mobile industry has been so rife with suits and countersuits that if every complainant managed to sue every subject of its ire out of business…well, there’d hardly be a mobile industry left.

I had trouble remembering the precise details of the umpteen cases that have made headlines–as well as some related relationships, such as Microsoft’s licensing agreements with Amazon and HTC–so I decided to document them with a handy-dandy infographic, as much for my own edification as anyone else’s.

A few notes:

• This covers only patent-related suits, not ones solely over trademarks, employee poaching, and other issues.
• It only address mobile-related tussles (which is why LG’s attempt to prevent Sony from importing the PlayStation 3 into the US isn’t listed).
• It only involves great big companies, not smaller ones who are doing some of the suing.
• I’ve identified software and hardware companies that work together on devices (such as Microsoft and Samsung) but haven’t tried to indicate OEM and component relationships.
• I’ve also shown some licensing relationships I know about, but there are probably others.
• Any cases which I’ve forgotten about or didn’t know about in the first place aren’t here.

With that out of the way…

If you’ve got any corrections, additions, or thoughts about any of this, lemme know. I may update the graphic as future events warrant…although the mere thought of even more mobile legal spats cropping up is depressing me…

The license fee that Microsoft says it expects makers of Android devices to pay it would make it the only company to collect a royalty on every Android-based gadget sold. (Google gives away the software.)

In a blog post announcing the suit, Microsoft Corporate VP Horacio Gutierrez says:

By bringing this case, we are protecting our investments on behalf of our customers, partners and shareholders – just as other companies do. Our firm view remains, however, that licensing is the best way forward for the industry, and we will continue to prefer the licensing path to litigation.

Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble on behalf of its customers? Gee thanks. But some customers of Microsoft (and other tech outfits, including Apple, Nokia, HTC, and others) would much rather that the companies spent less time in court squabbling over patents on rather obvious ideas and more time actually making innovative products. (Barnes & Noble, unlike Microsoft and its partners, has succeeded in designing and selling an e-reader that large numbers of people want.)

In Microsoft’s defense, it’s not a lawsuit-crazy company–it says it’s only filed seven “proactive” patent suits in its 36 years in business. But maybe that’s an argument against cases like these, not in favor of them: The company sure seems to have done well over the years without resorting to stuff like this.

The music retailing business has almost completely collapsed; the nation’s biggest video-rental outfit is bankrupt and its largest competitor folded last year; Borders is threatened with extinction and its larger and more successful rival, Barnes & Noble, faces serious challenges. All this woe has befallen these industries at the same time that digital media–from music downloads to streaming movies–has boomed.

You can’t blame digital content alone for media retailing’s hard times. Storekeeping has always been a tricky business, especially during economic slumps. (I don’t think that MP3s or iTunes had anything to do with the demise of big chains such as Linens n’ Things. Long before Amazon and Netflix started distributing content digitally, they up-ended their respective industries by shipping physical goods through the mail–Amazon has better prices every day than Borders has when it’s having a going-out-of-business sale.) And several of the giant retailers that have crashed seem to have been the victim of their own boneheaded business decisions more than anything else. (Borders opened three locations within two miles of each other in San Francisco, all of which are now toast; the management of Hollywood Video mocked Netflix-style mail-order DVD distribution as a blip they didn’t need to concern themselves with.)

Anyhow, here’s a timeline of what’s happened to the nation’s largest physical-media merchants over the past eight years. It starts in February of 2003–a little over four years after Diamond Media released the Rio PMP300 MP3 player, a moment that I, at least, consider the real beginning of the digital revolution.

Ready?

February 2003

Wherehouse Music declares bankruptcy, says it will close up to 120 of its 370 stores; it blames its woes on digital music piracy.

February 2004

Tower Records goes bankrupt; it too says digital piracy is to blame.

November 2004

UK music retailer HMV closes its last store in the US.

January 2006

Musicland declares bankruptcy.

February 2006

Musicland says it will shut down 226 Sam Goody stores, 115 Suncoast Motion Picture Company stores, and all of its Media Play stores.

August 2006

The Washington Post reports that 7500 of the 9500 chain music stores in the US that existed in 1991 have closed.

October 2006

Tower Records goes bankrupt. Yes, again. “We are not commenting other than to say that at the present time we have no intention of closing any of our stores,” a spokesperson tells the San Francisco Chronicle. “Our goal is still to maintain the Tower Records brand.”

December 2006

Tower Records closes its last 89 stores.

March 2007

Borders says it’ll close 250 underperforming, undersized Waldenbooks locations.

June 2007

Blockbuster says it intends to close 282 troubled stores.

September 2007

Hollywood Video announces plans to close 520 struggling stores.

October 2008

A struggling Borders says it’s secured financing to continue operations and may put itself up for sale.

Wal-Mart decides to shrink its stores’ CD sections.

January 2009

Virgin Megastore announces plans to close its New York flagship store; it will become a Forever 21.

After 85 years, San Francisco’s Stacey’s Bookstore closes, saying sales have fallen by 50 percent in eight years.

February 2009

Virgin also decides to shutter its other New York location and its San Francisco store; the latter is across the street from a thriving Apple Store.

March 2009

Virgin decides it’s on a store-closing roll and chooses to do in all the remaining US Megastore locations which it hadn’t decided to dismantle in January and February.

Terminally ill consumer electronics giant–and once-mighty seller of CDs and DVDs–Circuit City finishes liquidating its stores and goes out of business.

April 2009

In a regulatory filing, Blockbuster says it’s not positive it can remain in business.

September 2009

Hollywood Video decides to close 205 locations.

Blockbuster says it may close up to 960 locations–22 percent of its US presence.

November 2009

Borders says it will close 200 Waldenbooks and Borders Express mall stores.

December 2009

Trans World says it will close 150 FYE, Suncoast, and Sam Goody locations.

January 2010

Hollywood Video says it may shutter up to 1000 locations.

Blockbuster closes 253 stores.

Barnes & Noble closes the last 50 stores in its B. Dalton chain, which once had almost 800 locations; the folding of the one in Laredo, Texas makes it the largest US city without a bookstore.

February 2010

Blockbuster says it’ll close 150 more stores in April, with further cuts later in the year for a total of 500 to 545 closures. “While we believe the future is bright, the next 12 to 18 months will remain challenging as we balance the secular decline of a single channel with the ascension of emerging channels, such as vending and digital,” CEO Jim Keyes says in a canned statement.

May 2010

Hollywood Video declares bankruptcy, says it’ll close all 1900+ remaining locations, and proceeds to do so.

August 2010

Barnes & Noble puts itself up for sale (and doesn’t find a buyer–it remains independent as of February 2011).

September 2010

Blockbuster files for bankruptcy and says it will close many more stores. “After a careful and thorough analysis, we determined that the process announced today provides the optimal path for recapitalizing our balance sheet and positioning Blockbuster for the future as we continue to transform our business model,” says CEO Jim Keyes.

Best Buy says it will slash store space devoted to DVDs and CDs.

November 2010

Borders says it will close 17 stores.

Barnes & Noble plans to reallocate space for toys, Nook demonstration areas.

January 2011

HMV says it will close 60 British and Irish stores.

February 2011

Borders files for bankruptcy and announces plans to close at least 200 more stores. President Mike Edwards says the move “affords Borders the opportunity to move forward in implementing the appropriate business strategy designed to reposition Borders to be a potentially vibrant, national retailer of books and other products”

Whew. I think that’s at least six thousand individual retail locations that have vanished, and it’s not a complete list. As you might guess, I’m not inclined to cling to shiny discs or dead trees out of pure nostalgia, and a fair number of the defunct businesses above were no great shakes–but putting together this list still left me feeling wistful.

But here’s a less melancholy note on which to end this exercise: The best locally-owned purveyors of physical media seem to be in better shape than the soulless megachains. San Francisco’s Amoeba Music, Le Video, and Green Apple Books, for instance, are sprawling, wonderfully quirky independents that are still very much with us. Thank goodness for that. I feel like I might live long enough to see the city get down to its last music retailer, video-rental business, and bookstore–and I’d be awfully sad if they were a FYE, a Blockbuster, and a Barnes & Noble…

And then it dawned on me: With the recent development that Apple is going to require creators of e-reader apps to sell books using its in-app purchasing feature, it’s not the least bit clear what the fate of Kindle books on Apple devices will be. (Apple says that as long as e-readers support in-app purchases, they’ll be able to retain access to digital books bought elsewhere–even though this violates the App Store approval guidelines.)

I’ve spent several hundred dollars on Kindle books over the past few years. Nowadays, I do about 80 percent of my reading of them on an iPhone and an iPad. An e-book I can’t read on Apple gizmos would be dramatically less valuable. And it’s not clear what’s going to happen to the Apple-compatible e-reader apps offered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Kobo.

At the moment, Apple charges third-party sellers a thirty percent commission on content offered through the App Store’s in-app purchasing option. But as Reuters’ Aaron Pressman noted in a comment on an earlier post here, the “agency pricing” system used for e-books only gives Amazon and its competitors thirty percent of the book’s price. In other words, if Apple insists on getting a thirty percent cut, it’s demanding all the profit. That’s not going to work.

It’s possible that Apple has a tenable plan here–which would presumably involve charging Amazon and other e-book sellers a fee of a lot less than thirty percent of the book price. (At this week’s unveiling of News Corp.’s The Daily iPad newspaper, Apple Internet services honcho Eddy Cue made reference to an upcoming announcement involving content subscriptions; maybe single-copy sales will also be part of the news.)

Maybe Apple has even shared its plans with Amazon and other e-booksellers; maybe they even had a say in figuring it all out. Or maybe Amazon and others have a strategy for opting out of Apple’s new stipulation without leaving Apple devices behind–presumably something along the lines of the proposal floated by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, who thinks that e-book sellers should build entirely Web-based readers. We just don’t know. And thanks to the opaque nature of Apple’s explanation of such things, it’s not clear when we will know.

I’m also unclear what’s going to happen to the existing versions of e-reading apps such as the iPhone and iPad Kindle apps. My guess is that if I never upgrade them, I’ll be able to use the current versions indefinitely and get access to my Kindle tomes. But I’m not positive.

Best case scenario, this all works out in a way that Apple, Amazon, and consumers can live with. Worst case scenario, Kindle e-books become the equivalent of music locked up with Microsoft’s ill-fated PlaysForSure technology: They’ll work on just about every gizmo out there…except the Apple devices that dominate the market.

In any event, this Amazon “Buy once, read everywhere” ad from a couple of months ago–which involves a lady taking her “vast Kindle library” with her when she dumps her iPhone for an Android handset–suddenly has a whole new meaning…

In the end, I snapped up the Kindle edition of the book I decided to buy today. But I’m still fretting that my “vast Kindle library” may be about to get less useful. One nice thing about dead-tree books, even though they cost more than electronic ones and take up more space: Once you own one, its capabilities aren’t subject to change…

Barnes & Noble issued a press release today that it had sold “millions” of Nooks since the first version’s release in December of 2009. But it mostly bragged about Nook sales without disclosing them, by saying that Nooks are the company’s best-selling products ever, and that the Nookcolor is its best-selling gift this holiday season.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that with millions of NOOK eReading devices sold, the line has become the company’s biggest bestseller ever in its nearly 40-year history.  The new NOOKcolor Reader’s Tablet, introduced just eight weeks before Christmas, is the company’s number one selling gift of the holiday season. Barnes & Noble also announced that it now sells more digital books than its large and growing physical book business on BN.com, the world’s second largest online bookstore.

[snip]

Demand for the critically acclaimed NOOKcolor remained high following the product’s introduction in late October through the holidays. Sales have continued to exceed the company’s high expectations.

The only hard number in the release is the “millions” of Nooks sold; we can apparently assume that B&N has sold at least two million devices. (A few weeks ago, it was a minor news story when an Amazon staffer said that “millions” of third-generation Kindles had been sold in 73 days; I wonder if B&N would have been even this specific if Amazon hadn’t made the leap first?)

Barnes & Noble’s release follows a recent Amazon one which doesn’t mention specific Kindle numbers, but does say the new model is the company’s all-time bestseller, and that it outsold Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Amazon.com today announced that the third-generation Kindle is now the bestselling product in Amazon’s history, eclipsing “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7).” The company also announced that on its peak day, Nov. 29, customers ordered more than 13.7 million items worldwide across all product categories, which is a record-breaking 158 items per second.

“We’re grateful to the millions of customers who have made the all-new Kindle the bestselling product in the history of Amazon — surpassing Harry Potter 7,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO.

[snip]

On Christmas Day, more people turned on new Kindles for the first time, downloaded more Kindle Buy Once, Read Everywhere apps, and purchased more Kindle books than on any other day in history.

As I’ve said before, Amazon works so very hard to promote the Kindle on its site that it would be astonishing if it weren’t its best-seller. If it devoted the same energy to pushing, say, the iPad Nano, it too might well outsell everything else. And the comparison with Harry Potter, while fun, doesn’t tell us much. (Or at least not as much as we’d learn if we had concrete sales numbers for, say, the Kindle and the iPad.)

Canadian e-book underdog Kobo also issued a press release this week. It’s both vaguer (it doesn’t make any specific claim about e-readers) and more specific (it talks about hundreds of thousands of devices–including phones and other gadgets that can run Kobo software, presumably–being activated per day). And it quotes a bunch of stats comparing Kobo’s current performance to earlier performance numbers. Which we don’t know.

Kobo, the only pure-play global eReading service built on an open platform, today revealed its Holiday 2010 momentum.  This Christmas, readers around the world received new eReaders and iPads and other eReading devices under their tree.   Over a million people connected to Kobo, and hundreds of thousands of devices were activated each day since Christmas Eve, fuelling the highest eBook download rate in the company’s history.   People around the world chose Kobo this Christmas, with the popular easy-to-use Kobo Wireless eReader, dozens of compatible eReaders, top-rated applications for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and one of the largest catalogues in the world with over 2.2 million eBooks, newspapers and magazines.

“Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve, or an equivalent number hardcover books stacked as high as 50 Empire State Buildings ” said Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo.  “I would like to thank our customers for choosing Kobo to start building their digital library this Christmas.   Our success this holiday season is a pre-cursor to a New Year with people reading more than ever thanks to eBooks and Kobo.”

Kobo’s holiday growth also included:

·         Total registered users nearly doubling from the six weeks prior

·         A 50X increase in purchases from previous Holiday weekend last year

·         A 5X increase in purchases from the previous biggest weekend (also in December)

The image of a stack of hardcovers as tall as fifty Empire State Buildings is fun, but also doesn’t involve a concrete number. (If the hardcovers in question were an inch thick on average, we’d be talking 750,000 e-books…which sounds like it might be in line with Kobo’s claim of a million users “connecting” to its service and hundreds of thousands of new users a day. Then again, maybe Kobo is talking about two-inch hardcovers.)

One other major e-reader manufacturer, Sony, hasn’t put out any press releases about sales as far as I know. But the company has said that “millions” of units have been sold (since Sony’s first Reader came out more than four years ago) and that they might sell out this holiday season.

Bottom line: e-reader companies almost never use real numbers except when they can mention (unspecified) millions of something.

Now, nobody in the e-reader business is required to disclose information that might be useful to competitors, or which might not be as impressive as some industry watchers would have expected. But tech companies in other categories are far more likely to use real numbers–almost always when they’re especially impressive, and sometimes even when they’re not. Last week, for instance, Apple issued a release saying that sales of the new Apple TV were about to top one million. That’s a respectable number, but not a surprisingly spectacular one; knowing it actually tells you something.(Then again, I don’t think Apple has disclosed issued press releases about any iPad sales figures since way back on June 22nd––as noted in a comment below, it’s revealed them in financial statements.)

Similarly, Microsoft has said that Windows Phone 7 handset makers sold 1.5 million phones to wireless carriers in the first six weeks–actual useful information that can be used for at least ballpark comparisons with other stats such as Google’s claim of 300,000 Android activations per day.

Maybe it’s just me–and maybe I’m misinterpreting–but my conclusion probably isn’t the one that e-reader makers want me to come to. My takeaway from all the vagueness is that they’re afraid that people won’t be impressed by sales–at least in comparison to smartphones, MP3 players, and other products which aren’t Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.