The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.

First, there’s a color screen. No, not the whole thing, just an awkward strip across the bottom which allows you to see small covers of your books, and converts to device navigation when you’re not browsing.

Second, you can lend books. This one might have been a game changer, as neither the Sony or the Kindle allow you to loan books to other device-weilding book mavens. A game-changer were it not for the fact that you can only loan a book once. Once. One time for that book, period. It’s a gift that’s only almost as good as not being able to loan books at all. With friends like these… yeesh.

I have the Kindle 2 — Amazon’s remix of their self-acclaimed hit e-book reader. I love it. For sitting down and reading a book with my feet up on the couch, with coffee, and maybe a cruller, it’s the perfect device. The screen is clear, and the fact that it’s not backlit means no eye-strain for long reads. It’s easy to navigate. It’s compact and terrific for vacations on which I’d usually lug along a bookbag. It’s the best way to read a newspaper, too. Seriously, dead-tree apologists haven’t spent enough time on the Kindle; it’s like having a newspaper that is clean, organized, and searchable, right there in your hands.

But, then, I love cross-word puzzles. The Kindle has a keyboard, so I assume I’ll just turn to the crossword and get solving, right? Nope. No dice. No crosswords on the Kindle. For that, you have to turn to something like the computer or the iPhone, which I happen to have in my pocket. OK, fine. No crosswords. How about books not in the Kindle fancy-format? You bet. PDF. Effective two weeks ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users can now drag PDFs to their Kindle 2′s when connected to their computers, or use their Kindle email address and have the documents processed and mailed for a fee.

Or, I could go back to my iPhone and read any damned thing I want right now, PDF or not. And this, right here, is why hardware e-book readers will be one of the shortest-lived gadgets in tech. They’re very cool, until you realize they’re never quite cool enough.

The Kindle epitomizes the paradox of the single function device: focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well, while your competitor focuses on nothing and delivers much with mediocrity. Turns out that in all but the most extreme cases, people want a device the does more, more often, and smaller. I can read my Kindle or my Nook books on my iPhone. I can read PDFs. I can edit documents and take pictures and send emails and play games that let me push people down stairs.

The hardware failings of the Kindle and this ilk come only when you have really discovered your delight in the device. You love reading so much on it, that you want to read more. You want to read email and webpages. But you can’t, not without suffering through the pain of lag in the E-Ink screen. You want speed, but you can’t have that either; the device was designed to do all the heavy lifting that comes with turning pages, for crying out loud. Anything more and you need a laptop.

Luckily, and where I happen to be quite bullish, is in the e-book as a technology and platform for further development. The best thing that could happen to reading books electronically would be for all these devices to fail in spite of themselves — in spite of the industry they’ve kindled. That may just mean that people have rediscovered their love of the written word beyond email and the web, and that they demand more of the tools that help them consume it.

For anyone looking for a recommendation before you head out shopping for that someone special, I’ll keep it simple. Buy a Kindle. It’s less stupid than the others. Then see if you remember how to read.

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.

1. The application is easy to use and is largely pretty intuitive… on most things.
2. Apple’s FairPlay copy protection is broad enough not to affect the majority of users.
3. Interaction with the store and purchasing music and video is a seamless process for most users.

There are a lot of qualifiers in there, a lot of “mosts” and such, but truly the iTunes store opened a door for legal downloads that no others have been able to beat. The integration between device and application that has been so important for Apple allowed them to hit the sweet spot: create a device that people want, and don’t piss users off when they try to use it. Microsoft couldn’t beat it. So, they jumped on board with the Zune and eviscerated all their partner contracts for the old “PlaysForSure” program in one motion. The Zune Marketplace created the same walled garden that the iPod/iTunes ecosystem used, and even while the early Zune execution has been sluggish, they are doing a lot of things right, making their core user base very happy in the process. They have a lot to be proud of there. Amazon MP3 adds what this market has needed for a very, very long time: store level competition. The Amazon store hits home in the three key areas, too:

1. The store has an almost-application feel, making browsing intuitive and welcoming.
2. All 2 million tracks are DRM-free; no artificial device count limits to hit your head on.
3. Interaction with the store is — after the first purchase — as easy as dealing with iTunes; music is automatically transferred to your music library on purchase, with no additional user interaction required, Windows or Mac.
4. And of course, it’s cheaper…

In some cases a whole bunch cheaper. Apple’s DRM free tracks come only from EMI and cost users $1.29 each, while most albums still hold the $9.99 price. Amazon hits home with $.89 tracks, price variability by song length. So longer songs cost you more, but not enough more to cost more than Apple. This competition thing… it’s important. Of course, Apple will drop the price on their DRM free tracks in the very near future, and will likely announce new label partnerships to one-up Amazon. And Amazon will counter, with more music, more labels, and better service. And all of this will better the industry and the musicians who exist here. If the production of music is truly becoming the promotional piece for the concert set, then having access to all the music I can get my hands on in a smart, efficient, fair manner benefits both sides of the transaction. What’s coming out of the fray is a new model for thinking about distribution and it’s got artists thinking. The same way corporations are stepping up and creating their own media, their own signal, musicians are realizing they can do the very same.As frustrating as label-opoly markets can be, the transition to the other side of the bell curve is a good place to be. This is a good time to be a fan.