In the past couple of years, Amazon has gotten even more aggressive with its strategy to solidify its position in the tablet market. The latest rumor suggests that Amazon may be working on the idea of building brick-and-mortal boutiques to showcase its e-readers, tablets, and other products. Unnamed sources have told Google E-Reader that Amazon will be starting its brick-and-mortal journey with a retail store in Seattle.

This will be a pilot project. Amazon does not plan to bring stores to a place near you right away (unless you are in Seattle). These stores will focus on selling high margin and high-end items, including the Kindle e-readers and accessories for those. The company is expected to sell select print books through its store. It could also provide its customers a hub, through which they would be able to search through e-books.

Amazon may be selling all kinds of products online. But its main focus remains on digital products at this point. By building its own physical stores, Amazon will not only get around the internet taxation discussion, it will also put more pressure on Barnes & Noble and Apple (the former is already refusing to stock physical books from Amazon’s publishing platform). If the rumor is correct, we should see the first of Amazon stores in 2012.

What’s your take? Good move by Amazon?

Not to be outdone by Amazon, B&N is throwing its own promotion, covering all NOOKs. The site is offering a free $25 B&N gift certificate with every new NOOK. The promotion covers the NOOK Tablet, NOOK Color, and NOOK Simple Touch devices. You will need to use your MasterCard credit card to take advantage of this though.

The first deal is not that exciting. At $179, Amazon will have a hard time getting people excited about refurbished Kindle Fires. The second deal requires you to use your MasterCard to get a $25 gift certificate to B&N. The good news is these companies will have more of these promotions in the upcoming months.

Are you excited about any of these promotions?

The Kindle Touch has received positive reviews from long time Kindle users. The device is very affordable. Unfortunately, it will take Amazon some time to make this device available for sale in every country. For instance, the WiFi Kindle Touch can’t be shipped to Germany at this point.

Amazon will make the Kindle Touch available for most of these countries in the near future though. There is no word on when the 3G Kindle Touch will ship internationally though.

Amazon is in desperate need of good news for investors at this point. While the company is selling a ton of Kindle Fires, its net income and profit margins are quite alarming to the investor community. The study does suggest that Amazon needs to work harder to make Kindle Fire owners satisfied. Only 54 percent of Kindle Fire owners in this research said that they were very satisfied with their tablet.

Amazon has a great opportunity to solidify its position in the tablet market by making some improvements to the current Kindle hardware. Adding volume buttons and a basic camera could go a long way towards keeping Kindle Fire fans happy. But can Amazon keep the prices down? We will have to wait and see .

We have heard all kinds of crazy claims about the negatives of adopting e-books. Every year that goes by, people get more comfortable with the idea of publishing and consuming e-books. Author Jonathan Franzen is certainly not a fan of e-books. In fact, he thinks the world might not work because digital does not feel permanent (at least to him):

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing — that’s reassuring … Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

When changes happen, not everyone reacts to them the same way. Some want to fight the change while others adopt it and use it to their advantage. Mr. Franzen loves the idea of print books being permanent. After all, we could always go back in time to see what a certain author had said about a topic years ago. With e-books, that may be harder to do but not impossible.

Many of us who grew up with printed books have found it hard to switch completely to e-books. The future generations may not spend a whole lot of time around printed books. At the same time, thanks to the richness of the e-book platforms around, they will get a more interactive experience out of their books. Those who do not like the idea of e-books will have enough years to enjoy printed books. The idea of fighting e-books because they are not permanent enough is a bit ridiculous though.

What’s your take?

Amazon had a quite successful year in 2011. It brought the Kindle Fire to the market and sold millions of these e-readers in the last month. In fact, studies have shown that Amazon Kindle Fire may already be on its way to becoming the #2 tablet right behind the iPad. But Amazon has been losing a ton of money to get here. It is no secret that Amazon loses money each time a new Kindle Fire is bought. That partially explains why the company’s shares have started falling as the company has missed sales estimates yet again.

Amazon earned $17.4 billion in revenue in the 4th quarter of 2011 (missing the $18.3m estimate). But net income fell by 57%. Investors are particularly disappointed that Amazon got less revenue from digital media than anticipated. The fact that Amazon is not as profitable as some were hoping can be explained by the company’s push to squeeze margins to grow. But the sales slowdown is not a good sign for Amazon.

Amazon has put a lot of pressure on other players in the tablet market by offering the Kindle Fire for such a low price. The company is really pushing it with its pricing strategies. So its expenses are expected to remain high for the time being. Will investors stay patient? We will have to wait and see.

Reading e-books on tablets can be very convenient. You get to interact with your e-books and won’t have to carry heavy books around. But did you know that these devices could cause us neck pain? A study done by The Harvard School of Public Health suggests that tablets could end up causing neck pains for many of us over the long run.

Tablets are very convenient devices to use. But the way people hold them when using them can be problematic. If you are using your neck muscles heavily to support the weight of your head, you are going to end up with neck pains in the future.

If you think about your position when you are hunched over looking down, your head is hanging out over space, so you are using your neck muscles to support the weight

explained lead writer of the Harvard study Jack Dennerlein. The good news is the study found out that people who use tablets do move themselves more often than people who rely on laptops and desktop computers to get things done. The eye strain caused by tablets is much less as people spend less periods of time looking at tablets.

Tablets are not really to blame here. Just like any other gadget, people need to pay attention to how they use their iPads, Kindle Fires, and NOOKs. Picking up a decent stand or mount for your tablet would help too. It will be interesting to see how tablets affect other parts of human body.

It was only a short couple of months ago that we saw B&N bring its NOOK tablet to the market. It seems the company is not done releasing new products.  A recent report by the New York Times suggests that a new NOOK device may be in the works and on track for a spring release. This device is expected to go head to head with the Amazon Kindle Fire. Of course, the details on this device are not known. Let’s not forget that B&N did drop the price of NOOK Color tablets to make them go head to head against the Kindle Fire.

It is more likely that this will be an upgrade over the NOOK Simple Touch. B&N already has two affordable Android tablets. The company is constantly under pressure from Amazon’s aggressive pricing strategy for Kindle devices. This does show that B&N is serious about staying competitive against Amazon in e-reader wars. But releasing yet another affordable tablet this early seems a bit unlikely.

Just provide the site with your zip code or the name of your city, and you are set. In most cases, you should be able to get a few decent results from OverDrive’s search engine. Each listing will show you the content formats you can get. The local address for each library is provided as well.

In order to check out a Kindle book from a library, you should get a pin number and a library card. Your favorite library site will most likely tell you how you can use what you borrow. Once you are done with this process, you are going to be redirected to Amazon to choose the device you want to deliver the e-book you have just borrowed to.

If you prefer borrowing ebooks for a short time and reading them before buying, OverDrive’s site is your best friend. It makes finding local libraries you can borrow from a piece of cake.

We have covered DODOcase products for tablets and e-readers here in the past. They are quite solid and elegant. Just in time for Valentine’s day, DODOcase has released new special edition cases for the iPad and Kindle Fire. These “Love Me” cases are a tad bit more expensive than regular cases by DODOcase. The iPad versions set you back $79 whereas the Kindle Fire versions cost $69.

The artwork of the Love Me cases is courtesy of of Curtis Kulig. The Vintage Love cases have an ornate gold design and look quite sophisticated. These cases offer decent protection for your tablet. They are handcrafted in San Francisco. DODOcase products are not very cheap but they do offer you a good bang for your buck. The special edition cases by these folks look even more sophisticated.