The new, larger-screen Kindle (which is rumoured to be unveiled by Amazon tomorrow) will be better able to display charts, diagrams, and images than the current six-inch screen. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, Amazon has made deals with several textbook publishers to make their products available for the device, as well as with some universities:

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

Five other U.S. universities are involved in the pilot project (Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University). There is still no word on when the Kindle will be released in other countries.

Tomorrow, May 2, is the eighth annual Free Comic Book Day – the best day of the year for comic book fans. Participating comic book shops across the country will be offering a selection of free issues to their customers, ranging from superhero comics such as Wolverine: Origin of an X-Man to kiddie fare such as a special Disney/Pixar Cars book.

Stores across the nation are hosting events to celebrate, featuring author appearances, book signings, and more. In Toronto, the biggest party will be at The Beguiling from noon to 5 p.m. This year the shop has teamed up with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival to produce a special comic book, titled Comics Festival!, featuring cartoonists who will be exhibiting at the TCAF next weekend (May 9-10) – many of whom will also be at the store’s Free Comic Book Day event.

To find your nearest participating comic book store, use the store locator on the main page of the Free Comic Book Day site (even though it says to enter a zip code, your postal code will work just fine).

It may not be the equivalent of the sans-coulottes rising en masse during the French Revolution or a student facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square, but there appears to be a grassroots uprising of sorts developing around the pricing of e-books sold through Amazon for use on their Kindle readers. According to Galleycat, a group of almost 250 Amazon users have initiated a boycott of Kindle titles priced at more than $9.99. These currently include bestselling titles such as The Secret, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman, and the new novel by Harlan Coben.

There are currently 808 titles on Amazon with the “9 99 boycott” tag, including some (like Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer) that are sold at $9.99 on the nose.

Not surprisingly, most of the online commentary supports the rebellion: it’s another example of the people making their voices heard against the greedhead publishers and corporate behemoths. And to be fair, many of the arguments the boycotters are making have merit: Kindle e-books are not as permanent or as versatile as actual books (they can’t be marked up, lent out, or printed out), and there is a tradition of electronic content on the Web being priced more modestly than its physical counterpart (one reason why iTunes became so popular).

Still, it’s fallacious to presume that e-books don’t cost publshers anything to produce (even without the cost of paper, printing, and warehousing, there are acquisitions and editorial costs to be factored into the equation), and they are still getting gutted on their margins for regular books by sites like Amazon, which demand steep discounts on the titles they sell. Mark-ups for e-books may seem like price gouging on the part of publishers (and this may indeed be the case), but the bottom line is that this segment of the market is still negligible, and publishers need to make money if they want to survive. Perhaps the solution is to sell more e-books at a lower unit cost; whether or not the Amazon boycott has this effect remains to be seen.

Slate has done a little investigation into the philanthropic efforts of Amazon, and discovered, basically, that the retail giant doesn’t really do philanthropy.

Recent Amazon.com SEC filings and annual reports make no mention of grants, charitable donations, local arts support, or any other civic-minded efforts by the online giant. By contrast, their rival Barnes & Noble actually notes community relations in its annual reports and maintains a Sponsorships and Charitable Donations page complete with application instructions. For that matter, most multibillion-dollar corporations pay at least some lip service to doing good – especially when the company itself is doing great.

Puzzled, I e-mailed Patty Smith, Amazon.com’s director of corporate communications. Yes, she said, she’d like to hear Slate’s questions. But when asked specifically about the extent of Amazon.com’s charitable contributions – indeed, for any comment at all on a corporate policy regarding philanthropy – the company’s response was silence. Repeated calls and e-mails have since gone unreturned.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 began shipping to eager U.S. technophiles earlier this week, and while few consumers have actually received the device as of yet, the anticipation is reaching ridiculous levels. According to an article on Computerworld – which appears to have been researched solely by perusing online forums – many Kindle 2 customers have begun posting copies of their Amazon shipping notices online, as a sort of badge of honour.

“Oh joy, joy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” a customer from Texas using the name Elsi wrote in a Kindle forum on the MobileRead community site.

“Add my voice to the collective cheer, to all who [are] about to get a Kindle 2. Enjoy!” wrote another user going by the name Joobies in the same forum. The thread began on Sunday, when a user named Lilly posted a copy of her Kindle 2 shipment notice from Amazon.

Elsi, Joobies and several other commenters on the forum compared notes on how much they paid for shipping and the exact day that they hope to receive the reader. Others promised to share their reactions once they activated the device.

As the Computerworld piece goes on to note, a few consumers actually had received the devices Tuesday, including somebody identified as tvBilly, who “misses the rubber on the back of the Kindle 1″ but finds the Kindle 2’s new charger “the best thing since sliced bread.” Another user, named Frank of Doom, writes:

“I was clever enough to have mine delivered to my office. It’s sooooooo pretty! First impression is very positive, I love how the page buttons tilt in when pressed instead of out, feels much more solid. Not sure I’m going to get much work done today.”

Today, Amazon has announced the release of Kindle 2, the new version of its popular Kindle e-reader. Priced at U.S.$359, the new version of the device includes an improved display, with 16 different shades of grey (who knew?), 25% longer battery life, and the capability of storing 1,500 books.

And, according to the Wall Street Journal, one selling point may be a new work of fiction by Stephen King, produced exclusively (at least in the short term) for the device.

It is possible that the King work — in which a Kindle-like device plays a role in the story — could be published as part of a physical book at a later date by the author’s current publisher, Scribner, an imprint of CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster publishing arm. Scribner last November published Mr. King’s most recent book, “Just After Sunset: Stories.”

Efforts to elicit an email response from Mr. King were unsuccessful. Spokesmen for Amazon and Simon & Schuster both declined to comment.

This Quillblogger has in the past got into some hot water for daring to criticize the unchallenged ascendency of e-readers, and will refrain from doing so here. Presumably Oprah’s endorsement last fall (which, according to the WSJ might have contributed to the device’s unavailability over the crucial Christmas selling season), along with the King story, will result in healthy sales for Kindle 2.

In the wake of poor holiday sales in brick-and-mortar bookstores in the U.S. and the U.K., Internet retailers are being accused of coming by their simultaneous sales success unfairly, via overzealous discounting. As reported by The Bookseller:

Kes Nielsen, head of book buying at Amazon.co.uk, denied that internet retailers, who had discounted some titles by more than 60% in the run-up to Christmas, were solely responsible for declining average selling price. He said: “I don’t think you can single out a particular channel as in some way leading the charge [for discounting]. It’s a very competitive environment and everybody is doing their bit to offer value and that’s what we are doing as well.”

There’s nothing new about online retailers squeezing margins, of course, but it looks like Amazon in particular might have finally taken it too far:

Nielsen refused to comment on its ongoing dispute with Hachette over terms. The impasse, over the level of discounting Amazon receives, has led to the retailer removing some “Buy New” buttons when displaying Hachette’s key titles. Despite this, Hachette-imprint Orion’s A Quiet Belief in Angels was Amazon.co.uk’s number 10 bestseller for 2008.

It’s the circle of life. Last week – the same week that saw what Pages Books & Magazines proprietor Marc Glassman refers to as a six-month “stay of execution” on the store’s lease – The Globe and Mail reported that another longtime Toronto independent, David Mirvish Books, would be shutting its doors for good at the end of February.

Eleanor Johnston, manager of the store for more than 25 years, said there was no one reason for the Feb. 28 closing. “David [Mirvish] just felt that it was time, that the retail world has indeed changed a lot…. [But] it’s not really a question of us not being able to weather those shifting sands, to mix metaphors. I think we just decided, ‘It’s enough; it’s time.’”

Although the demise of the much-loved Markham Street bookstore is unfortunate, Toronto book-lovers can at least comfort themselves with the news of Pages’ lease extension, and the imminent arrival of the Roxanne Reads New & Used Bookstore in Riverdale, and the long-awaited Toronto outlet of the prairie-based mini-chain McNally Robinson Books.

The world may be in the grip of a global recession, but that hasn’t stopped some people from spending profligate amounts online for individual books. According to AbeBooks.com’s list of most expensive books sold in 2008, the top price was paid for a copy of Francis Seymour Haden’s Études à l’Eau-Forte, a collection of 25 etchings, which went for the modest sum of $17,216. Also on the list was a first edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which sold for $12,874.

Meanwhile, on the AbeBooks’ bestseller lists, Canada’s own Eckhart Tolle scored the top spot for the North American site, with the Oprah-endorsed volume A New Earth. Other books on the North American list include The Audacity of Hope, by U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, and – appearing somewhat out of place among the nine other potboilers and self-help pablum – Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Quillblog is puzzled by this one, and wonders whether it represents a momentary lapse of reason on the part of the reading public or whether it just appeared on a massive number of course syllabi in 2008.

The Germans seem to have better more sophisticated more literary tastes than their North American counterparts: AbeBooks’ German site has The Gulag Archipelago and The Divine Comedy at the number one and two spots, respectively.

UPDATE: This story contains material that has been corrected. The title of Eckhart Tolle’s volume was originally cited as A Good Earth, which is incorrect. Quillblog regrets the error.

The Canadian Press is reporting that Canadian sales of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series have begun to outstrip Harry Potter. The news comes via Indigo, which reported this week that sales of the Twilight series have surpassed 600,000 copies in 2008.

According to CP:

The paranormal romance of Bella, Edward the vampire, and Jacob the werewolf has become so popular among young readers this year that the Twilight Saga has eclipsed the number of Harry Potter books sold at the Canadian bookstore in 2007, including the launch of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This sales milestone comes in the same week as the highly anticipated Twilight movie hits the big screen.

“I never expected to see another series sell as many copies as Harry Potter did in 2007. For the Twilight series to have sold more copies in 2008 than the Harry Potter series did last year is truly extraordinary,” says Trevor Dayton, Vice President, Kids and Entertainment at Indigo Books & Music Inc.