On Sunday night, Amazon began embedding audio and/or video in a handful of Kindle e-books for the iPhone and iPad. On Monday, it released a Kindle e-reader for Android phones–and it can’t play those sounds and movies. As with other first incarnations of Kindle apps, it gets the job done but feels a bit bare bones: For instance, if you tap on your phone’s Search button while you’re reading a book, you get a message saying that search is coming soon.

This is still good news for Android handset owners–especially ones who (like me) have already invested in Kindle e-books. It also cements Kindle’s position as the most widely-deployed of the e-reading apps associated with a major book merchant: You can read Kindle books on Amazon’s devices, PCs, Macs, iPhones (and iPod Touches), iPads, BlackBerries, and now Android phones. ePub, championed by Barnes & Noble, Sony, and others is more theoretically open, but it’s kind of moot so long as everyone wraps their e-books up in copy protection and Amazon’s books work with the widest variety of hardware.

When Kindle books debuted back in 2007, they contained only words and grainy black-and-white photos. Last year, they got color pictures when they arrived on the iPhone (and later on Windows PCs, Macs, and the iPad). And now a handful of Kindle books pack multimedia features, thanks to new editions that can play back audio and video when you view them on an iPhone, an iPod Touch, or an iPad.

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Amazon is providing a sneak peek of its Kindle reader for the iPad. The page is titled “Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers Including the iPad,” which sounds like confirmation that other new versions for (mostly) still-to-come devices are also in the works–I’m guessing ones for Windows-based Slate PCs and for Android. And judging from the images on Amazon’s preview page, it looks like the apps may be slicker than the sparse and disappointing Kindle apps that the company has released to date.

Kindle will have company on the iPad: The New York Times is reporting that Barnes & Noble is also working on a reader. Engadget says that the Hearst-backed Skiff platform will “almost certainly” show up as well (an assertion for which its source is…me). And then there’s Apple’s own iBooks.

After the jump, a couple of screenshots of the Kindle app. No word on how quickly it’ll show up after the iPad does on April 3rd, but presumably it’s in Amazon’s interest to give Apple’s bookstore as little of a head start as possible.

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Amazon has released its Kindle for Mac software, letting OS users get at all those e-books in Kindle format. It should be a boon to anyone who has a Kindle, has bought books for it, and wants to read ‘em on a Mac–but I’m on the road sans Mac at the moment, so it’ll be a few days until I can try it for myself. If you snag it, let us know what you think.

TUAW says it’s “no-frills,” which is a description I’d apply to all the Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-reader apps I’ve tried for every PC and mobile platform. I’d like to see a company with access to as many books as these two release reader apps that are truly slick and full-featured. Maybe Apple? (You gotta think that it’ll make tomes from its iPad iBooks Store available on Macs and PCs eventually.)

At the moment, my main phone is a Droid, so I also await a Kindle reader the Android…something I also suspect is in the works.

More evidence that competition doesn’t exactly flourish on the iPhone and, soon, the iPad–at least if the company you’re attempting to compete with is Apple….

Nintendo’s DSi XL will double as an e-reader soon after it launches next month, though it won’t have anything close to the book selection of Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

The DSi XL, a chunkier, larger-screened version of Nintendo’s wildly popular gaming device, goes on sale in the United States on March 28 for $190. The “100 Classic Books” collection, which includes classic public domain works from William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and others, will be available in June, Bloomberg reports.

Sound familiar? That’s because Nintendo already released the books-on-a-cartridge to the United Kingdom in December 2008. I’m not sure why it took so long for the collection to come stateside, but reading the books on the DSi XL, with its 4.2-inch screens, sounds more pleasurable compared to the original DS and DSi, which had 3-inch and 3.25-inch screens respectively. And despite the growing competition among e-readers, Nintendo’s device could be the most book-like, with two displays that you can hold up side-by-side.

Nintendo’s sales and marketing vice president Cammie Dunaway told Bloomberg that the company’s not trying to get a piece of the e-reader market. Let’s face it, without a cloud book store or the promise of weeks-long battery life, the DSi’s not equipped to do so anyway.

But I do think publishers would be wise to start bundling books onto DSi cartridges. Imagine the entire Harry Potter series on one cartridge — what a great gift that aunts and uncles who clueless about video games can give to their niece or nephew who has a DSi. As Dunaway said, “It’s just one more way to enjoy your device.” It shouldn’t start and end with the public domain.

Scribd–the site that lets anyone publish, share, and embed documents of all sorts–is making its way from the browser onto phones and e-readers. The company is launching a feature today that lets you transmit Scribd documents you’re reading online to portable devices with a few clicks. It’s handy and very, very simple.

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Among the gazillion products making their debut this week at the Consumer Electronics Show: Skiff, the first reader from a new spinoff of publishing behemoth Hearst. The Skiff has the largest (11.5″) and highest-resolution (1200 by 1600) screen of any e-reader to date; it uses a new “metal foil” technology from LG instead of glass, making the gizmo sturdy and thin; and it emphasizes magazines and newspapers more than most e-readers, as you might expect of a reader that emerged from Hearst. (Kindle and Nook both offer magazines and books, but in a drab, text-oriented format that looks more like a 1986 CompuServe screen than a real periodical or a Web page.)

Whatever Skiff is, it’s definitely not an unimaginative Kindle wannabe, and I’m looking forward to seeing it at the show in a few days. But I’m not unreservedly excited about the profusion of new e-reading devices that are arriving. We have a sufficient supply of hardware–at least hardware that utilizes monochrome e-ink displays. And e-reading is going to be a hundred times more exciting once the industry agrees on some standards that make these devices as compatible with an array of content as Web browsers have been from day one.

Skiff apparently plans to license its platform to other devices too, and that’s smart–but it’s still a proprietary format that won’t work with every major e-reader. To mention CompuServe yet again, we’re still stuck in the equivalent of the era when CompuServe, AOL, GEnie, and others duked it out by building their own proprietary technologies and licensing exclusive content. You think it’s a coincidence that the online world only really took off when the Web knocked down those walls?

Here’s the e-reader development I most want to see: An e- format that’s largely based on existing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other Web technologies, with a dash of something along the lines of Google Gears to make it possible to peruse publications when you’re not online, plus some sort of mechanism for enabling paid content. Something, in other words, not wildly different from the Web as we know it, except in a form that provides more of the visual elegance and browsability of print. Seems simple enough to me…

Sony’s Reader e-readers have a decent selection of books, but–unlike the Kindle and Nook–they haven’t done newspapers or magazines. (There’s an RSS reader feature, but as far as I can tell, it’s been busted for months.) But Sony just struck a deal to bring News Corp. content, including the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and the New York Post, to its e-readers. I hope more’s on the way–especially now that the company’s launching the Reader Daily Edition, which can snag periodical content wirelessly as it’s available.

Amazon, which started selling the Kindle internationally back in October without fully localizing it, is now distributing the Kindle iPhone app in sixty countries. Good news for folks around the world who are interested in reading bestsellers and other recent, still-in-copyright tomes on their iPhones. (I have a Kindle but do most of my Kindling on my iPhone these days–reading a few pages at a time when I’m in line at the grocery store or otherwise confronted with a sliver of free time I can devote to a book.)

[UPDATE: I tried again, and Kindle for PC is now downloading all my books swiftly and reliably. Not sure why it wasn't before...]

I’ve been playing with Amazon.com’s new Kindle for PC application over the past 24 hours, and while the idea of having access to my Kindle books on my PC remains mighty appealing, the software as it stands in beta form is a bare-bones disappointment.

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By almost any imaginable definition, last week was the newsiest ever in the still-new world of e-book readers. We witnessed the unveiling of Barnes & Noble’s ambitious Nook. We got more details about Plastic Logic’s long-awaited device. We learned of an underdog known as the Spring Design Alex. We were informed that Amazon was killing the original Kindle 2 and lowering the price of the model with international roaming, and saw a demo of an upcoming Amazon Kindle reader application for Windows (a Mac version is also in the works). In short, the era in which it was logical to use “Kindle” as shorthand for “book-reading gizmo” is over.

It seems like a good time, then, to put some basic facts and figures about a bunch of major and/or new e-reader competitors in one place. After the jump, a quick Technologizer Cheat Sheet.

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Gizmodo has posted what it says are photos and details of the e-book reader that Barnes & Noble is reportedly getting ready to release. The most interesting tidbit: It supposedly has a 6-inch monochrome e-ink screen that’s very much like the one on Amazon’s Kindle–but also a smaller color multi-touch LCD beneath that one, which is home to features like the keyboard and much of the book-shopping interface. It’s an interesting idea which would sidestep some of e-ink’s limitations (besides lacking color, it refreshes slowly).

The device is also said to be cheaper than the Kindle; to offer books published by Barnes & Noble itself at low prices; and to provide access to Google Books’ wealth of out-of-print tomes.

I’m still waiting for someone to release an e-book device that simply gives up on e-ink’s principal virtue–amazing, weeks-long battery life–in favor of all the benefits of color. If such a device were able to eke out ten hours on a charge, I might prefer it to an e-ink-equipped gizmo, even if it forced me to do far more babysitting of the battery.

Of course, a color device without enough battery life to read an entire book might really be a tablet computer, not an e-reader. One way or another, I suspect we’ll get the opportunity to watch “traditional” e-readers and tablets duke it out during 2010…

I like these rumors: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that bookstore behemoth Barnes & Noble will soon start selling its own e-reader device, and Gizmodo has a tip that said device will run Google’s Android OS. For all the things that are good about Amazon’s Kindle, it suffers from being a sophisticated electronic device designed by a company whose expertise doesn’t lay in designing sophisticated electronic devices. By going with an existing operating system, Barnes & Noble could avoid doing a lot of heavy technical lifting, and would be able to leverage all the things that Android is already capable of doing.

B&N, not surprisingly, isn’t confirming the scuttlebutt. It told Reuters:

We have made no announcement about an electronic reader…We believe readers should have access to books in their digital library from any device, anywhere and anytime.

The company is indeed putting its digital eggs in multiple baskets: It’s powering e-book stores for the iRex and Plastic Logic devices, and has released an iPhone app. Unlike Amazon.com, it’s supporting the ePub standard, which will let you buy a book from B&N and read it on any other ePub device, including ones that the company has nothing to do with.

At the moment, Amazon remains the only superpower of the e-book world (well, maybe Sony too, but let’s see how its latest round of devices do). Consumers will benefit if there’s at least one other company that comes out with a really spectacular device and does a spectacular job of selling it. Maybe Amazon’s recent Kindle price cut and international rollout were pre-emptive strikes against an imminent B&N reader?

Back in July, Amazon.com endured a bout of bad publicity and inspired debate about the ethics of copy protection when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customer’s Kindle e-readers after discovering they were pirated. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized and called the action stupid. Now the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog is reporting that Amazon has e-mailed the Kindle owners whose books it erased and offered to restore the tomes (along with any notes taken) or issue a $30 gift certificate or check.

It’s not entirely clear why Amazon is making the restitution six weeks after the dust-up, but Digits notes that a class-action lawsuit was filed over the incident.

Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna–hey, was she an Orwell character?–but I tend to think that Amazon’s decisions and consequent humiliation served the greater good. Or at least I’d hope that other companies with the technical power to delete content from customers’ devices will remember the Amazon case and decide the bad publicity just wouldn’t be worth it.

Slates Farhad Manjoo has a good story up about how Sony in particular and e-reader makers in general can build an e-book device that’s better and more popular than Amazon’s Kindle. One graf that left me mentally applauding:

I’d counsel Amazon’s competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they’d be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he’s got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I’d prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with most online music—but many in the publishing industry would never go for that.) Kindle’s rivals could also get together to create a huge, single ePub bookstore. Publishers would have a big incentive to feed this store with all their books—if they provide books only to Amazon, they’d be helping to create a monopolist in their industry, and that’s never good for business.

Manjoo says he hopes that Sony and/or other players provide Amazon.com with intense competition. So do I, for the same reason–I don ‘t want Amazon or Google or anyone else to dominate electronic books any more than I’d have been happy if Random House (say) had cornered the market on dead-tree tomes. Right now, Sony seems like the best hope for a strong Amazon alternative (Plastic Logic is a fairly promising dark horse). The upcoming Sony Reader Daily Edition leaves me cautiously optimistic, but I’d love to see more companies leap into the action…