the buzz log

Imagine a campus in which students carry only man-purses, instead of 80-pound packs stuffed with textbooks. Amazon may soon get additional academic credit as more university publishers sign up with its wireless reading device.

Kindle will start carrying titles from Princeton University Press this fall. According to Inside Higher Education, the prestigious outlet joins the presses published by Oxford, Yale, and University of California in going digital.

The textbook savings aren't going to be instant. Kindle, which hit the market in November and was instantly backordered for weeks, cut its $399 price a measly $40. With some titles only a few dollars cheaper than the paper version, textbook readers save mostly on shipping costs and time. Plus, Kindle is clearly in its infancy with a clunky interface and, as one otherwise enthusiastic blogger notes, few social networking elements.

Still, people have been buying the digital reader, and one analyst calls it the new iPod. Amazon originally targeted the male tech-toy buyers, but women are apparently the true audience. Females have been warming to Kindle and currently makes up half of the device's searches, which have been growing after a post-holiday lull. The Wall Street Journal opines the product could be a moneysaver overall, partly due to its free mobile Internet access and costs of regular titles. Then of course there's instant gratification: Owners could download a former White House press secretary's sold-out memoir on the fly.

No word on whether Amazon will "pull an Apple" and come out with a thinner, sexier version at half the cost, but the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests a 2.0 is in the works. 

Filed under: Tech, Books, Reading, Electronics, School

From the looks of the iPod buzz yesterday, it appears that many of those stockings hung by the chimney with care were stuffed with teeny Apple MP3 players. The only gift to show in our top 25 queries on Christmas Day, the iPod (and its music software, iTunes) was the king of holiday searches in 2006.

Searchers were especially interested in free things to trick out their new music players, whether it was "free ipod music," "free ipod music video downloads," "free ipod games," or "free itunes download." But some people were still looking to spend money to make their players cool by dialing up "ipod nano accessories" and "ipod cases."

Get those new earphones out of the plastic wrap and tune in to our top iPod and iTunes searches…

Filed under: Music, Electronics, iPod

Interest in Apple's iPod shows no signs of abating, with searches on the portable media machine up 5% over the last week. It's made it on to so many wish lists, it's now ranked in our top 50 searches overall -- no mean feat for a piece of equipment. The two newest iPods in the product line are duking it out for supremacy, with the tiny iPod Nano looming over the Video iPod by a 4 to 1 margin in Search. Popular accessory searches over the past week include: "ipod speakers," "ipod case," "ipod skins," "ipod covers," and "ipod car accessories."

To fill your iPod with photos, you need a sleek digital camera. Canon leads the brands in Search, followed closely by Sony. Rounding out the top five manufacturer searches are Kodak, Olympus, and Nikon. People shopping for the right camera to record those precious moments were also likely to search on "photo printers" and "photo paper."

And while many of those who have HDTV still haven't figured out how to hook it up properly, that hasn't deterred other couch potatoes from seeking it out. Searches on HD are consistently strong as people seek to have the biggest and flattest hanging over their hearth by December 26. Popular HDTV-related searches include: "HDTV antenna," "HDTV reviews," and "HDTV tuner." We're surprised "HDTV help" didn't rank higher, but we're sure it'll spike on Christmas afternoon as new owners unwrap their presents.

Filed under: Electronics, Gadgets