A press release from the European Commission doesn’t provide much detail into the probe, which will look at Apple along with Lagardère Publishing’s Hachette Livre, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, CBS’s Simon & Schuster, Pearson’s Penguin and Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

The EU says it will “investigate whether these publishing groups and Apple have engaged in illegal agreements or practices that would have the object or the effect of restricting competition.”

It also says it will look at the “agency” pricing agreements that Apple pushed through when it introduced the iPad back in 2010. Those deals allow publishers to set the retail price of their books, and give retailers like Apple’s iTunes a set percentage of the transaction.

The previous wholesale model, championed by Amazon, allowed retailers to set the price of books. After a series of high-profile negotiations, Amazon has moved to the agency model as well; the e-commerce giant still dominates the e-book market.

Mr. Cuban has written a 30,000-word e-book, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” Culled from blog postings Mr. Cuban has made over the years about his business career, it will be available for $2.99 through online digital-book retailers. To drive sales, Mr. Cuban plans to tap all his online followers.

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I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.

Maurice Sendak, to Guardian reporter Emma Brockes, about how much he hates e-books

Sure, I signed a couple of iPad covers, Kindle covers. I’ve got no problem with that. But just because some people like their e-readers doesn’t mean we should sweep all the remaining paperbacks in a pile and strike a match. Maybe bookstores are no longer 30,000 square feet, but they are selling books.

Author Ann Patchett about her recent book tour in Sunday’s New York Times.

Readmill, a soon-to-launch iPad app and accompanying Web site, helps users highlight passages in the e-books they are reading, and turns those passages into shareable, embeddable permalinks. So just as you might post a YouTube video on your blog or Twitter, Readmill will allow you to share quotes.

There is, of course, an underlying social network where users can follow each other’s reading histories. Users can also post comments and minireviews about the books they’re reading, which could eventually help inform book recommendations.

And the Readmill app has some nifty features that quantify personal reading stats by visually depicting for users how far along in a book they are, and how much they’ve read per session. Readmill founder Henrik Berggren showed me, for instance, that he spent 21 hours over the span of six months reading the epic novel “Shantaram.”

For now, since Readmill works only with EPUB books rather than proprietary formats, it mainly has access to older classics.

What Berggren would like to do is get the Readmill API included in e-book applications, to bring a social reading experience to larger libraries and user bases. He said he’s making some progress on that front, but it’s slow. Market leader Amazon Kindle is “proprietary to the core,” he said.

Both Kindle and Nook already have some social features. Amazon, in fact, has come under fire for automatic-sharing settings. Berggren argued that Readmill offers a superior social experience because it’s built to be social from the ground up.

Currently the Berlin-based Readmill team is working on a marginalia mode for its next release, which will make it easier for users to share their comments directly within books. Berggren said the service should open to the general public in the next couple months.

Readmill has raised about €300,000 ($431,460), led by Index Ventures and Passion Capital.

At $4 a pop — via Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ Nook stores — “Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street” costs less than a single copy of the print magazine.

It’s also a bargain if you’re a fan of Murdoch biographer (and non-baseball expert) Michael Wolff, whose work accounts for 20 percent of the copy here.

In other PhoneGate news, News Corp. has told employees at its New York Post tabloid to “preserve and maintain” any documents related to phone hacking.

News Corp., which also owns this Web site, has maintained that none of the systemic voicemail hacking that has come to light at its News of the World tabloid occurred in the U.S., but investigators will be looking into the matter, regardless.

The $25 price difference is being made possible through the introduction of advertising on the platform. The so-called “Kindle 3G with Special Offers” is available starting today and will ship immediately.

Amazon cut the price of its Wi-Fi model to $114 last month by introducing advertising on the platform. In the six weeks that model has been available, it has become the bestselling member of the Kindle family, said Jay Marine, director of Amazon Kindle, in a statement.

As the tablet and e-reader market heats up, price will become a competitive advantage.

However, Marine told us last month that there’s no chance the device can ever be subsidized heavily enough to become free.

Still, it may be able to afford much larger discounts in the future. In a sense, Amazon may actually be building a much broader–and more profitable–deal network, a la Groupon. For example, one of the offers is $10 for a $20 Amazon.com Gift Card.

A revenue stream like that could provide a competitive advantage to Amazon if it launches a rumored Android-based tablet, which is estimated to be available before the holidays.

Today, Barnes & Noble unveiled its new one-button Nook, which costs $139, and yesterday Kobo announced a touch-sensitive e-reader that will cost $130.

Liberty Media Chairman John Malone and chief executive Greg Maffei told investors Monday that the potential for the Nook platform to become the e-book application of choice for consumers on all tablet devices built on Google Inc.’s Android operating system helped motivate the company’s bid for the ailing bookstore chain.

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In fact, the e-reader was never supposed to be a big part of its business, but now it is seeing the merits of pursuing a hardware business as well.

Today, the Toronto-based company is unveiling its latest e-reader, which comes with the same gray-scale displays that the devices are known for, but boasts a touch display. Users will be able to flip to the next page of the book with a swipe of their finger, a much more natural motion than having to use a directional keypad.

Starting today, the new Kobo eReader Touch Edition will be available for pre-order at Indigo in Canada and Best Buy, Borders and Wal-mart in North America. It will cost $130, and will start shipping in early June.

The company’s first-generation device will be marked down to $100.

“By default, we launched the first device to get into the market,” said Todd Humphrey, Kobo’s EVP of business development. “But what we found is we were able to remain competitive….We are an e-book company, but the device is part of that strategy. We’ll continue to put out top-tier devices in the market.”

Kobo, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in December, announced in April that it had raised a $50 million round in venture capital to help it go up against some serious competition.

Also pursuing e-books are much larger rivals, such as Apple with the iPad, Amazon with the Kindle and even Google. Additionally, Barnes & Noble, which has invested heavily in the Nook, plans to introduce a new e-reader tomorrow at an event in New York.

Humphrey said the decision to produce additional devices does not mean the company is less invested in the digital e-book side of the business.

“I think we are a hardware company in the sense that the device is a pure reading device. They aren’t suddenly getting emails or ads, or allowing people to play Angry Birds. Our consumers have told us they like a single-purpose device, and we will continue to meet the needs of our customers,” he said.

Other e-readers are morphing into tablets as companies see the success of the iPad, and Amazon is rumored to be working on one of its own.

Kobo says it has more than 3.6 million users in more than 100 countries.

But it has not disclosed how many of its original Kobo devices it sold, just like Amazon, which also refuses to say how many Kindles it has sold. The biggest hint it provided recently was that it is now selling more e-book titles than paperback and hardback combined.

Humphrey would not say if a tablet would be next for Kobo or not.

“We have nothing to announce, but we are looking at all the options. We want to enable great reading experiences,” he said.

“As a former Amazon Associate, I can tell you that a great many sales of Kindle Books are for the 99¢ complete Dickens, etc.”

–Movie critic and Web publisher Roger Ebert, providing some context for Amazon’s stat about Kindle e-books outselling print books.

Amazon says that since April, it has been selling 105 Kindle titles for every 100 print copies it moves. Reminder: Amazon only started selling Kindle e-readers in November 2007.

In the past, we’ve seen similar numbers from Jeff Bezos and company, but they’ve always come with caveats–Amazon was only talking about hardcovers, or softcovers, etc. Now Amazon wants to be clear–it’s comparing apples to apples (and not counting free e-book titles, which are very popular on the site).

Amazon still hasn’t released sales numbers on actual Kindle units, but today we can give the company a pass on its non-disclosure, and just let it soak up the plaudits it deserves for moving its flagship business from physical to digital in less than four years. (Pay attention, newspaper, TV, movie, and music executives!)

From Amazon’s release:

• Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
• So far in 2011, the tremendous growth of Kindle book sales, combined with the continued growth in Amazon’s print book sales, have resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s U.S. books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years. This includes books in all formats, print and digital. Free books are excluded in the calculation of growth rates.
• In the five weeks since its introduction, Kindle with Special Offers for only $114 is already the bestselling member of the Kindle family in the U.S.
• Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.
• Less than one year after introducing the U.K. Kindle Store, Amazon.co.uk is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books, even as hardcover sales continue to grow. Since April 1, Amazon.co.uk customers are purchasing Kindle books over hardcover books at a rate of more than 2 to 1.

Squires takes over the CEO role from Brian Jacobs, who founded the company nine years ago.

Akademos also announced that Kohlberg Ventures, which invested in the company three years ago, has increased its stake. It has now put a total of $5 million into the venture.

Akademos sets up “white label” bookstores that sell both physical and digital texts; it also runs textbookx, a direct-to-consumer retail site.

Squires, whose last job was the interim CEO at the Next Issue Media e-magazine joint venture, says he’ll be focused on helping the company work with open source textbooks.

“2:46 Quakebook,” a Twitter-sourced collection of personal accounts of the quake and its aftermath that will soon be available for purchase here, is one group’s response to the disaster initiated by the local blogging community that aims to raise money for relief efforts (the title refers to the time at which the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11). All proceeds will go to the Japanese Red Cross.

The e-book, which has gone from conception to completion in around a week and a half, is a case study in the collaborative power of social networking, a vital tool for many in the immediate aftermath with cellphone communications and transport seriously disrupted. Over 200 people—both Japanese and non-Japanese, but mostly living in the country—submitted their experiences and reflections to the project through written accounts and photography, while the editing and design was handled by an international Twitter-based network of bloggers, writers and designers.

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Inkling has not disclosed the amount of its “multi-million dollar” financing but suffice it to say it is sizeable; the San Francisco-based company already employs 40 people.

Inkling currently has 14 titles available, and plans to expand to 100 before the start of the school year this fall. Along with the investment, McGraw-Hill and Pearson have committed to iPad-ifying some of their top titles, including various undergraduate best-sellers, business and medical textbooks.

Inkling’s digital editions include features such as quizzes, interactive infographics, a scrolling and searchable interface, and purchase by chapter. Each title is digitized individually, but the company is working to scale its efforts by creating templates for interactive content and using offshore development.

“We have a very sophisticated set of software tools that help us gently disassemble a textbook and then reconstruct it from the ground up to make something that really makes sense on an iPad,” said Inkling Founder and CEO Matt MacInnis in an interview about the added money.

MacInnis, a former executive in Apple’s education division, added that his company strikes a balance between competitors like Kno (which will likely sell off the tablet part of its business), e-book sellers who essentially offer PDFs, and “super precious high-touch content” like that of the new start-up Push Pop Press, which is making an iPad version of Al Gore’s latest book.

Inkling expects to expand to Android and to release some of its creation tools to publishers later this year.

Image courtesy Inkling, from “Music: An Appreciation,” Kamien et al, McGraw-Hill Higher Education

It’s about IBM’s years-long effort to build a computer smart enough to beat the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. And we’ll know how it turns out next month, when the quiz show airs a series of pretaped matches between Watson–IBM’s machine–Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, “Jeopardy”’s most successful champions.

But Baker and publisher Houghton Mifflin aren’t waiting for the end of the show to start selling the tale.

You can buy an e-book version of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” via Amazon or Barnes & Noble today, and start reading immediately–you just won’t get the last chapter, about the climactic battle.

Then in mid-February, immediately after the face-off has aired, the booksellers will send readers the end of the book, either beamed directly into their e-readers or shipped to their PCs.

(And if you’re into delayed gratification, or paper and ink, you could also just wait till mid-February to buy the complete edition in hardcover.)

Novel, right? Sort of. For e-books, the serial approach is a new one, and both booksellers had to be coaxed into doing it.

But selling books on an installment basis is a really old idea, dating back at least to the 1800s, when greats like Balzac and Dickens used to serialize their stories. New Yorkers supposedly gathered at the docks to ask incoming passengers for updates on Dickens’s characters.

And perhaps we’re headed back that way, since digital media allows creators to put out work in as long, or short, a format as they’d like, at whatever pace they want.

Amazon is already playing around with this with its clever “Kindle Singles” format, which sells mini e-books (i.e., novellas or long magazine articles) at mini prices.

And in Baker’s case, the strategy theoretically allows him to piggyback on a wave of publicity that IBM and “Jeopardy” are generating in advance of the shows. If you watched the NFL playoffs this weekend, there’s a good chance you saw, or at least fast-forwarded past, this spot:

Now the trick is to figure out how to turn that kind of media into book sales, which isn’t a given.

But Baker’s a clever guy–prior to writing this book, he was a longtime BusinessWeek writer and editor, and spent the last several years of his tenure covering technology–so I give him decent odds. He was able to get me to write this piece, for starters….

I own an iPad and love it for surfing the Web, watching movies, etc. However, I have just started to get into the e-book scene, and have found the iPad to be too heavy for long usage. Would I find the Kindle a better e-reader than the iPad?

A:

The Kindle is much less versatile, but it’s specifically designed for reading books. To that end, it’s lighter, works better in sunlight and has longer battery life than an iPad. Plenty of iPad owners, including me, find it to be a fine e-book reader, and it has color and a touch screen, features the Kindle lacks. I also like that, between chapters, I can use the rich ecosystem of apps on the same device. But you are certainly not alone in finding it a bit heavy for long periods of reading. So, yes, I do suspect you’d prefer the Kindle for reading books. Depending on your budget you could own both, especially since the Kindle now starts at just $139.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns online for free, at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

That’s more than 50 percent above the estimates that most Amazon bulls, like Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney, were floating just a couple of months ago.

Bloomberg attributes the numbers to “two people who are aware of the company’s sales projections,” so the data could still be off, from outsiders who don’t know what the company is actually doing. Or it could be 100 percent accurate, from employees who know precisely how many KIndles Amazon is selling.

Regardless, the notion that Amazon is selling a whole lot of Kindles feels right, according to my 100 percent unscientific anecdotal survey: I know several people who are buying Kindles as holiday gifts this year, and they’re not early adopters.

To me, that feels like a tech gadget going from novelty to mainstream, helped by a three-year marketing push (remember when those first, brutally ugly Kindles hit the market in 2007?) and a $139 entry-level price point.

Take another look at this chart from Mahaney’s October report, which plots the Kindle’s price drop over the years. By all accounts, it looks like you could flip this thing over, and it would give you a good sense of Kindle sales:

So what about the data that shows Apple’s iPad, which lets you read books in color and do a whole lot more, eating into the Kindle’s market share?

It may be correct, but also not relevant: Shrinking market share doesn’t mean you can’t have booming sales, and my hunch is that people who buy $139 Kindles end up buying more e-book titles per capita than the average iPad owner.

Also worth noting that Amazon doesn’t necessarily lose when someone buys an iPad and not a Kindle. The bookseller’s read-everywhere platform means iPad owners can read Kindle titles on their machines.

I can back this one up with highly anecdotal data, too: The iPad that stays in MediaMemo HQ is stocked full of e-books, and only one of them has been purchased at Apple’s iBookstore.

That’s as close as the Seattle-based e-commerce company has come to revealing its sales numbers–ever.

In the past, it’s spoken in broad strokes, claiming that the device was “the fastest selling ever” or that the “Kindle is far and away our bestselling gift item.”

CEO Jeff Bezos also predicted that sales of electronic books will surpass paperback sales by next summer or fall, and sometime after that they will surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover sales.

Truth be told, that’s likely the more important figure for Amazon, rather than hardware sales. With an app virtually on every portable device, including the iPad and several smartphones, its electronic book distribution reaches way beyond the number of Kindles in the wild.

However, with increasing competition from Apple’s iPad and other devices, like the Barnes & Noble’s Nook, there’s still plenty of competition.

For context, the Kindle team says the number of Kindles sold this holiday season is more than the number sold in all of 2009. The sales figures were first mentioned and reported by Daring Fireball.

In September, Barclays’ Douglas Anmuth guessed that Amazon will sell about five million Kindles this year with the help of the latest redesign and more appealing $139 to $189 price points.

But he says he has now reconsidered and wants the book sold, after all–even if it angers some WikiLeaks supporters.

To recap: Amazon received a storm of criticism yesterday for selling this oddly named e-book “WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1 5000,” even though Amazon has refused to host WikiLeaks documents themselves.

Amazon’s common-sense answer to critics was that the book is commentary and analysis about the WikiLeaks data and that it intended to keep selling the title.

Later on Thursday, the book disappeared from Amazon’s shelves, and Amazon said it had been “removed by author.” But now it’s back once again.

What happened? I asked author Heinz Duthel to explain. We’ve corresponded via email, and while there’s a bit of a language gap (he’s a native German speaker), I think I understand the gist of the story: Duthel’s instinct after receiving threats was to yank the book, but now that he’s had time to think it through, he wants to sell it after all.

Below, an edited version of my correspondence with Duthel. I’m leaving his responses in their original form rather than risking making an inaccurate guess while cleaning them up:

December 9
Peter Kafka: I see now that the book is no longer available at Amazon’s store. The listing there says it has been “removed by author.” Can you please explain why you wrote the book, why you published it and why you decided to remove it?

December 10
Heinz Duthel: Yesterday I had a shocking day (at age 61) with my III. book about Wikileaks. I did remove the book after I received about 60 emails (anonymous) with insults like ‘after finish with paypal, mastercard, amazon’ we will remove you and all your books from the web’, ‘we know who are you and we will take care about you singing daughter (she is 15 and started to make some music since 2 years) and so on. Amazon.com did send me one email (Stephanie Derouin of Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing (DTP) Executive Customer Relations. Can you please confirm that this is your intent? You may email me at [xxx]@amazon.com. ) so I replied that I have removed the book because I don’t want that amazon.com is hacked only because of my wikileak book.

Since then one of my domains, heinzduthel.com has to be removed from my hosting company because of high cpu usage. This from 1:30 till 5:50 European Time. Now the domain is back again (amazon shop script) but I had to clean the cache for 2 hours on the domains, because it look like I had a few hundred thousand ‘visitors’.

Kafka: Your book now appears to be available on Amazon again. If that’s true, why did you decide to do so given the threats, etc.?

Duthel: I am surprised it is online again because I left this up to amazon.com in my email as you have seen. I think there is no reason why it should not be online, because I think the comments bellow the book atamazon.com are not justified at all.

…honestly this book (Wikileaks IV) is nothing else then just about Assange, Wikileaks and why, what, question marks, comments etc.

This book is in fact something for readers interested to know what is going on or what is Weakileaks and have no time to search the whole internet, sources, media, press etc.

Kafka: I am surprised to read that you’re surprised it’s now available. Did you specifically tell Amazon to remove your book? And are you okay with the fact that it’s available once again?

Duthel: Peter, to question I:

Here is the email after I have removed the book and Amazon did ask me if this has been my intent.

Dear Miss Stephanie

No it has not been my intent, I have just been informed after reading the news in Google.com that maybeamazon.com would have or get problems from all this hackers or world regulators, like Mastercard, Visa or Paypal. So this is not my attention.

I think this book like any other has the right to be online and no one can or has the right to commit extrajudicial proceedings against books or publication.

But you can see all this supporters of Wikileaks and Julian Assange black mail each and every one who is against their self proclaimed freedom of press.

After talking with my family Lawyer this evening in France he suggested to place back the book or books as it is up to Amazon to decide what is wrong or good and not some self appointed world regulators outside there…

To question II.

Yes I am OK if the book is online and available because it has been the reason why I wrote the book, but I left this up to amazon.com because I don’t want to be responsible if because of this book amazon.comget problems, hackers or what ever.

Today’s addition, which is one of dozens of native apps available in the Kindle Store, is from a small Redmond, Wash.-based start-up, which has built Wordoku, a spin on Sudoku, that uses letters instead of numbers, and acts just like puzzle books found in airports, drugstores and bookstores. The application will cost $3.99, much like other games available in the store.

While it’s easy to dismiss the release as just another game for the Kindle, Roy Leban, CTO and founder of Puzzazz, sees it as much more and has ambitions to change the kind of applications that are built for the Kindle. In all seriousness, he says: “This is big. People will look back at this and really see this as a big change in puzzle delivery.” It’s being called the first in a series of ActiveBooks for Kindle.

The app is the first one that Puzzazz has built, and has taken priority over other more robust developer platforms, like the iPad or other smartphones. Puzzazz has five employees and is self-funded. Leban takes no salary and does consulting on the side to support his habit.

As a true puzzle enthusiast, who’s been published in the New York Times and has been a part of eight previous tech start-ups, Leban is easygoing and entertaining, and puts you on the spot by asking you riddles. In one such example, the clue is “Cape horn?,” 8 letters.” (See bottom of post for answer.)

He claims he can breathe new life into the Kindle games. Some of the other titles that have been produced in the beta program are Electronic Arts’ Sudoku and Solitaire, and there are also four additional titles that have been developed by Amazon, like Blackjack and Minesweeper. But clearly they are all repositioned games from other platforms.

Leban claims the approach is wrong. The Kindle is fundamentally not a gaming platform–it’s an e-reader.

To that end, he doesn’t call his new title a game–it’s a puzzle book. It works in the same way as other puzzle books. You can start one puzzle and not finish it. Then move on to the next page and come back later to take a stab at the first one again. Users can change the difficulty after buying the book that fits their needs; otherwise, the puzzles get slightly more difficult as you work your way through the 100-page book.

That’s unlike EA’s offerings, because you have to start a new game and can’t return to multiple puzzles once you’ve left the screen.

To achieve this, Leban says, the puzzles aren’t computer generated, but rather developed by humans with the help of some algorithms. While the differences may be perceived as slight, he says it’s a quality standard that a Saturday New York Times puzzle solver could appreciate compared with the easy puzzles found in drugstores.

But could his idea be even bigger than this?

That’s his hope.

Kindles, iPads and other emerging tablet devices are also expecting to deliver college textbooks, which today are much like scanned pages of a PDF. Why couldn’t a textbook be more interactive?

Students could solve math problems in the same paragraph that introduces the concept, and if their answers are incorrect, they could be instructed on where they went wrong. “The publishing world is so old-school and they don’t have imaginations. They need a kick and we think we serve as a kick.”

As for whether the Kindle will be a big platform for third-party apps, it’s hardly comparable to Apple’s developer community or approval process for the iPhone or iPad. According to the KindlePost.com blog, it’s been announcing three new games for the past two months.

With no numbers on how well the Kindle is selling, or how well the games on the Kindle are selling, it’s unclear what Leban’s real opportunity is, other than getting the standard 70 percent cut of each puzzle book he sells. The Kindle developer program is in beta, which occasionally releases titles to the Kindle Store. A few games have been highlighted in the Kindle blog.

Riddle from above: First clue is “Cape horn?” (8 letters), additional clue is “Horn of South Africa,” third clue is “World Cup noisemaker.” Answer: Vuvuzela.