Am I tempted? I'll admit to being tempted. Am I stupid enough to pay $240 over a year in order to get a $99 Nook for free? Sure, I'm that stupid.

I think this is a clever promotion. The truth is, I'd love to sit down with the New York Times on Sunday mornings and look things over; I might even check it out on other mornings with my coffee if it were this convenient.

Will I get that experience from the Times on a Nook? I don't know. Perhaps I'll regret it a month into the subscription.

And if I didn't already own books in the Kindle eco-system (what is this world coming to?) it might be a double-no-brainer.

But, still... I'm tempted.

Another "no sh!tter" from Business Insider.

So... the plot thickens. How will Amazon remain relevant in an iPad world? By getting faster, better, smaller, lighter -- and cheap enough to be a no-brainer.

The battle lines are drawn -- iPad is expensive, pretty, and very multi-functional, with the potential to replace a laptop or netbook... and with the added advantage of some unique magazine and book-reading experiences.

Kindle is what is it -- a straightforward reading device. The WiFi edition is about the price of a half dozen hard-back books, give or take, which means with $9.99 pricing on many new releases, you'd make up the cost in about one dozen book purchases. Plus, trees don't die, the battery lasts weeks, you could slip it in a briefcase... and Amazon is clearly working on the weight and size so that the experience is (a.) as book-like as possible and (b.) even lighter and more flexible.

Finally, there's a certain Zen to having a device that by-and-large is for reading books, low-res newspaper stories and a little surfing of Wikipedia -- it won't get cluttered with to-dos, e-mails, notes, pop-up windows, etc. (Not that I have one yet, but that is what my imagination tells me.) Amazon may have just made my Kindle-vs-Nook decision for me...

For instance, the publisher was recently prevented from launching a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes, but would pay Time Inc. directly.

So Apple won't let Time sell a subscription to Time magazine via the iTunes Store. Isn't that kinda weird? I'm starting to think that Apple having too much control over the iTunes marketplace is a bad idea (which is why you have to be impressed with Amazon for having an iPad version of the Kindle software... smart thinking). Libre!

Wearing my publisher's hat I've noticed that Apple continues to delay approval for the Issuu iPhone app, which is the service we use to create "flipbooks" of the JFP. Issuu has been on Android for months now; according to their blog Issuu had been waiting 36 days as of July 6; it's now 23 days after that. (Carry the 1... 59 days. Yowza.)

Confluence of events -- over my vacation I started reading the "Girl Who..." trilogy at the behest of Ms. D and her friend Ms. H, and they're good. Very entertaining. I don't have the third one, which I plan to procure.

Meanwhile, this weekend while trying to kill some time waiting for Ms. D while she got her glasses fixed, I was in a Best Buy and got to fumbling around with the Nook. I found it interesting -- a bit tough to navigate initially, but then it kicked in and starting doing some cool stuff. Ultimately it got me thinking that a nice little reader of some kind could be what the doctor ordered -- might even be how I decide to read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Later, it occurred to me that the Kindle had also lowered it's prices as well. (Congrats, Amazon -- marketing works.) So I went to Amazon and floated around on the site for a while and *almost* bought one this weekend.

Since I've pretty much been wrapped up in the idea of getting an iPad (when the stars align and the $500+ makes sense), I haven't thought much about a Kindle or Nook. Now I'm second guessing that.

Things I would use it for -- reading books (a plus for Kindle or Nook over iPad, IMHO) as well as for some quick surfing from my easy chair -- I like to read Wikipedia and IMDB entries about movies I've just watched. While buzzing around the Amazon.com site, I also got in my head the possibility that I might consume the New York Times on a regular basis if I had it in a fabulously portable format.

Advantages to the iPad, of course, are that I would also use it for app development and testing (for JFP and BOOM) as well as more in-depth surfing, perhaps some Netflix watching, documents, perhaps even sales, PDFs, flipbooks (again for sales or for demo-ing our publications) and other things I haven't thought about, like GTD processing.

But, iPad is $500 down the road and these things are less expensive. And enticing. And shiny (actually, rather matte, but you know what I mean). Hmm.