Barnes & Noble, with more than 700 physical locations in the U.S. and an online store, is making a serious attempt to dethrone the Kindle as the early e-reader market leader. Starting at the end of November, the Nook will sell for US$259 -- same price as the domestic-only Kindle. Like Amazon's device, the Nook features instant wireless downloads of books, newspapers and magazines. The Nook will use AT&T's 3G network for its over-the-air downloads. Both devices store about 1,500 books and are about eight inches long and five inches wide. Both take advantage of a wide selection of books available for download -- Amazon touts 350,000 books, while B&N says it will have "1 million" choices, but appears to be including newspapers and magazines in that number.

The similarities end there. Barnes & Noble has added a color touchscreen section to the bottom portion of the device's face. Most of the upper portion supports 16-level grayscale e-ink, but the 3.5 inch touchscreen section enables navigation, browsing and flipping through book cover art. Another key difference: the LendMe technology that allows users to lend the books they've downloaded to anyone else who is using another Nook, or is using Barnes and Noble's e-reader software on a smartphone, PC or Mac. The "borrowed" books disappear after 14 days. The Nook can also access Barnes & Noble WiFi hotspots in stores for downloads and browsing.

The problem is that the costs aren't nearly as much lower as you might believe. Here's one breakdown from Money magazine for a hardcover bestseller by way of Scott Laming of BookFinder.com Journal:

Based on a list price of $27.95

$3.55 - Pre-production - This amount covers editors, graphic designers, and the like
$2.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists
$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distribution for publishers
$4.19 - Author Royalties - A bestseller like (John) Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie piece to his agent, publicist, etc.

This leaves $12.58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however, when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price.

One way to look at this is to look at the percentage of the list price that printing represents. That's 10 percent--plus at least a chunk of the wholesaler line item. So let's call it 20 percent in all.

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...while the game has fundamentally changed, there are some compelling reasons to believe that the daily paper’s relevance can and will continue long into the future. Could personalized newspapers, specifically printed to meet the needs of an individual reader, alter the fates of publications slated for the chopping block? I say there’s a strong reason to believe so.

Recent advancements in digital print technology can make it possible for newspaper publishers to cost-effectively deliver publications that cater to specific demographics. Imagine this: Printers the size of a bus with the potential to print different editions of the same newspaper with editorial and advertising content tailored to the particular reader’s needs. Imagine your local newspaper with local sports news always on your front page because that’s what you want to read first.

In turn, today’s sophisticated digital printing technology offers new ways of leveraging personalization for advertisers. The same ad space in separately printed editions of the same newspaper, targeted towards different readers, could be sold to different advertisers. Why would a grocery store or dry cleaner want to pay for advertising that reaches the homes of people who live too far away to ever shop there? The targeted approach offered by this new digital printing provides more bang for the buck – the person who actually walks into his neighborhood store to buy the week’s groceries or clean their clothes.

The bottom line is that this new technology creates a win-win situation.

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Publish a book on paper, says a sheepish Beth Collins, and “I’m hesitant to read it.”

But send it through the ether to her feather-light Kindle 2, Amazon’s whiz-bang electronic reading machine, and she’s eager to get lost in its pages — virtual though they may be.

“The Kindle is more portable. It’s more readable,” said Collins, a 56-year-old high school administrator from Kansas City.

If enough people buy a Kindle or Sony’s rival device or a yet-to-debut electronic newspaper from Plastic Logic, the world of publishing could change forever — from how the written word is sold to how easy it would be to distribute your novel. It even would alter the meaning of publishing.

But the “ifs” are huge. Even in the Digital Age, building a great gadget doesn’t guarantee consumers will come.

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Greenplum has released new technology which it says can speed the loading of data into large scale databases, without compromising overall performance.

San Mateo, California-based Greenplum provides a high performance database (DBMS) typically used in data warehousing and large-scale analytical processing (or business intelligence) applications. It powers the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, and customers include the likes of Linkedin, Nasdaq, NYSE Euronext, Fox Interactive Media, and Myspace.

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