My book is now up on Kindle. 

The Nook is available at Best Buy, as well as Barnes and Noble stores, and of course via mail-order.

Looks like the Kindle folks have declared a price war, because now the wi-fi Kindle is $10 cheaper than the wi-fi Nook, and the 3G + wi-fi Kindle is (you guessed it) $10 cheaper than the 3G + wi-fi Nook.

The new Kindle has some nifty features, and a lot to recommend it.

But what finally sold me on the Nook was that, unlike the Kindle, the Nook is compatible with e-books checked out from public libraries online. Since I have library cards at 5, count 'em, 5, public libraries statewide that all have slightly-differing e-book collections, this capability is very important to me. Why buy a book if I can check it out of the library?

And by borrowing library copies of just one or two books, rather than buying them, I made up that $10 price differential almost immediately.

If, on the other hand, all you want to do with a reading device is buy books, download and read them, either device should work just fine for you.

A couple more advantages of the Nook. One, you can expand the memory by adding an SD card. Two, and VERY important, YOU, the user, can replace the battery yourself. Apparently with the Kindle, you have to send in the device to get the battery replaced.

Just learned that Target is the ONLY nationwide "brick-and-mortar" store that sells the Kindle in-store:

If you're tempted to buy the popular e-book reader from Amazon . . . but want to try it out first and perhaps compare it to Barnes & Noble's Nook . . . Target is the place to go: It's the only national brick-and-mortar retailer to carry it. The brand new Kindle 3, which is smaller and lighter than previous models, will sell for $189 at Target, the same price as at Amazon.com. "Look someone up in the store who knows how to work the device, so you can get a feel for it," suggests James McQuivey, a media technology research analyst at Forrester Research. If you've never seen someone use it, it can be a little bit tricky to figure out on your own.

 Just another public service announcement, for your perusal.

On a tip from TYWKIWDBI:

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

I installed a Firefox add-on called BetterPrivacy. If you read to the bottom of the article linked above, they have some other options listed.

Not, mind you, that I much care who sees that I browsed some photos at Flickr... but better safe than sorry.

Anyone besides me ever feel like they're playing whack-a-mole, trying to stay ahead of all the possibilities?

Cross-posted at the Coffee with CrankyBeach