Those of you who have had the opportunity to use your e-reader for some time are familiar with the advantages of using those devices to consume content. Platforms such as Kindle let readers get more out of their reading experience and share content and highlights with others too. Richard MacManus @rrw summarizes these positive points beautifully. But not all is rosy when it comes to e-books. The industry is yet to hit maturity, and there are major issues e-reader manufacturers, publishers, and authors need to deal with.

eBook Prices Are Too High

This goes without saying. Asking folks to pay $9.99 (or $14.99) for e-books just seems too much. It’s not as if Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad are free e-book readers. Besides, you do not really own your e-book when you can’t sell it or share it with others easily. I would not be complaining if all e-books were priced in an affordable fashion. Unfortunately, some e-books are selling for almost as high as their paperback version. Is that fair?

You Can’t Sell Your E-books

Going back to the previous point, e-book buyers simply can not sell their e-books. That means you are stuck with what you have bought forever. That is going to be a huge turn off especially for college students.

Can Your E-Reader Last

Kindle, iPad, and Nook are all great devices. But they all have a limited life-time. Your device may last you 1 year or 5 years. But you will have to keep buying e-readers to continue enjoying your e-books (unless you do not mind reading your e-books on your computer).

Amazon signaled a shift in its Kindle strategy when it introduced KDK a while ago. The platform was going to stay closed to a select developers, but the company did promise decent games and apps for Kindle. Just a few days ago, Amazon finally unveiled its first two games for Kindle. These games are mostly word games and are not exactly designed for gaming addicts. But they do appeal a lot to die-hard Kindle fans as Amazon forums are filled with positive messages from excited Kindle fans.

Free games are fun, but they do not tell us much about Amazon’s app strategy. Let’s take Apple. The company may have not had the best smart-phone on the market a few years ago, but it relied on its killer development kit and iTunes to encourage developers to bring their innovative ideas/products to iPhone. Paid apps can work for Amazon too. But can Amazon Kindle handle anything too complicated?

Apple has one of the best customer services around. The company always tries to provide the best experience possible to its customers. That does not mean it will fix your iPad if you damage your device on purpose (or are reckless with it). If you have damaged your iPad badly, you, most likely, have two options: buy a new one or try to fix the old one. In order to go with the latter option, you are going to need these iPad replacement parts:

iPad wifi back cover: managed to somehow damage the back of your iPad? This product is what you need to make your iPad look like new.

iPad Replacement LCD screen display: must have for those of you with a damaged iPad display.  This replacement part will make your screen look like new again. It’s not cheap though.

iPad 3G LCD Frame: it holds your LCD screen and digitizer together. You are going to need one of these to fix your cracked iPad screen.

iPad Screw Set: you are going to need these if you want to open up your iPad and change a part.

Yesterday, we received an e-mail from Amazon about its new Kindle store. At first, we discarded the e-mail as it looked awfully like a spam e-mail. As it turned out, the story discussed in the e-mail was true. Amazon has indeed launched a new Kindle store for UK customers. Kindle books can be purchased for as low as £1.96, which seems like a good deal.

It’s interesting to note that the books in UK Kindle store turn out to be a bit cheaper than the very same ones in the U.S. store (using the latest exchange rate). The Kindle store for UK does seem to recognize customers’ location based on their IP (which is why we received the message in the above screen-shot).

When Amazon announced Kindle Development Kit a while ago, it did promise us some exciting new applications. It has been a while, but Amazon has finally released a couple of games for Kindle. Shuffled Row and Every Word are two free games that Kindle owners can install on their devices right now. Both of these games are word games. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but Kindle is not a gaming device, remember?

I first wrote about the need for Amazon to introduce an app store in 2008. At the time, we were all hoping for a color-screen and somewhat more sophisticated next generation Kindle. Unfortunately, KDK does look a bit limited at this point. Kindle’s App Store (if we can call it that) won’t be beating iTunes anytime soon. Jeff Bezos does not consider Kindle to be anything more than an e-book reader, so trying to out-Apple Apple is not a part of Amazon’s agenda at this point.

Everyone knows that Amazon has been selling a ton of e-books. We just don’t know how well Amazon is doing as the company has not disclosed those all important numbers. That has not stopped the company from making claims and talking up its success. In a recent interview with CNET, Ian Freed, Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle, disclosed a few interesting numbers:

80 percent of Kindle books we sell are sold to Kindle owners. They may have a Kindle app on a phone or an iPad or Mac or PC, but they at least have a Kindle. So 20 percent do not.

That explains why Amazon is committed to its hardware business for now. Mr. Freed is still putting a spin on this, but it’s an impressive statistic. He also talked about how consumers are paying with their pocket-books (since most top-sellers are priced $9.99 or less). Mr. Freed did take his time to take a swipe at iPad:

it’s a totally different product. I mean, the product is a general-purpose tablet. We love that product because people use their iPads to buy a lot of products on Amazon… But for book reading it’s substantially heavier than a Kindle; the battery life is 10 hours versus 4 weeks on the new Kindle, and you can’t read it outside in the sun.

Amazon and Apple have been going at it hard over the e-book market supremacy. Amazon has been particularly aggressive with its strategy, picking up authors left and right. Kindle is a wonderful device, but it would not be half as appealing as it is today if Amazon did not offer the lowest e-book prices through its Kindle store. Publishers such as Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin have all struck deals with Amazon and Apple to offer these companies the lowest e-book prices possible. Apparently, that has not sitten well with Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general running for the U.S. Senate. After all, price fixing does mean consumers won’t get the best deal possible on their e-books.

These agreements among publishers, Amazon and Apple appear to have already resulted in uniform prices for many of the most popular e-books — potentially depriving consumers of competitive prices… The e-book market is set to explode — with analysts predicting that e-readers will be among the holiday season’s biggest electronic gifts — warranting prompt review of the potential anti-consumer impacts