From the Magazine

In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Barnes & Noble announced the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, which it says will stock every available e-book from every publisher, as well as e-book originals. The 700,000 titles currently on offer are compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and most personal computers, but will notably not work with the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader.

Author Thomas Nesbit announced this week that he will donate half the earnings from his e-book Deep Fried to the nonprofit 826 National, which runs literacy centers for school-aged children in seven American cities. This is the first such pledge to the organization by a debut novelist.

ScrollMotion, a developer of applications for Apple's iPhone, announced yesterday that it will release a new digital book reader for the device that will offer users a more comprehensive reading experience.

Two months after the National Federation of the Blind and eight other disability groups wrote a strongly worded letter to Random House asking the publisher to reconsider its decision to deactivate the Amazon Kindle 2's text-to-speech function for its e-book titles, Random House last week went ahead with its plan to disable the software, provoking a sharp rebuke from the coalition.