SmashWords is getting smashed by Read an E-book Week, reports Steve Jordan at Nate’s Ebook News blog. Smashwords is running a special promotion for the week, with 3,000 authors participating, and seems to be running into some bandwidth bottlenecks. This level of demand is certainly a great sign for the viability of the medium.

AllThingsD’s “MediaMemo” section reports that Barnes & Noble has hired Time’s Jonathan Shar to head up its "Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble.com" division. Shar is a 15-year veteran with both print and digital experience. B&N could probably have done a better job coming up with a department name, though.

The New York Times is planning to spin off its Book Review section as a separate e-publication for e-readers, New York Times Marketing Director James Dunn said today at a journalism symposium in Columbia, Missouri. Within the next few weeks, it will be published first for Sony, then for Kindle, and Nook e-readers. Dunn said that the paper would be looking at other sections to see what might best be spun off as further separate publications.

It seems that a Stanford survey has determined iPhones may be “addictive”—essentially by asking people, “Hey, do you think you’re addicted?” I’m not entirely sure I find that methodology convincing. Still, the convenience of always having something to read in my pocket is hard to deny.

The EFF has managed to obtain a copy of the license that must be signed by iPhone app developers. Since “the first rule of App Club is you don’t talk about App Club,” they had to file a Freedom Of Information Act request with NASA in order to look at it without agreeing to abide by it.

Fred von Lohmann reports that the license is extremely restrictive and one-sided in Apple’s favor—no surprises there. But it’s the rules of the road if you want a piece of the 40-million-iPhoneOS-device pie.

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