The Kindle gets plenty of attention, but the e-book reader is still a niche device. When will that change? When it gets cheaper. A lot cheaper, says a new Forrester study.

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Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest retailer, but online, it’s still a relative piker. Now the company is trying to change that by opening up its Web store to other retailers–just as its biggest competitors already do. But no need for Amazon and eBay to start sweating just yet.

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Sony started selling e-book readers long before Amazon, but blew its lead. So how can it catch up with its new device, which looks and works much like the Kindle, but costs $100 more? Maybe Sony can do it with the help of free books from your local library.

After Sony unveiled its new line of readers this morning, I posed that question to Sony executive Steve Haber, who immediately pointed out that his “Daily Edition” machine has a slightly bigger screen than the Kindle 2 and boasts a touchscreen.

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Sony did indeed have a bit of news to announce at the New York Public Library: Its most direct challenge to Amazon’s Kindle to date. Like the Kindle, the “Daily” reader will feature a wireless connection–Sony will use AT&T, while Amazon uses Sprint. And unlike current versions of the Kindle, the Sony device will feature a touchscreen.

But it will come at a price: The device will retail in December for $399. That’s $100 more than the current price of Amazon’s Kindle 2. And that price point is almost certain to drop in coming months.

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Here’s another company choosing a side in the coming e-book war: Irex Technologies, a Dutch company that plans on selling a Kindle-like reader in the U.S. this fall, has allied itself with Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore. Earlier this summer, would-be Kindle rival Plastic Logic announced a similar pact. And in other “e-book reader made by someone other than Amazon” news, Sony has a press conference scheduled for tomorrow.

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Flickr is one of the Web’s most popular photo-sharing sites. Flickr users’ camera of choice? The iPhone–even though the image isn’t great, the flash is nonexistent, and the only way to zoom is to move your hand closer.

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Ready to toss dirt on the old, unloved CD? You’re going to have to wait a while. Compact discs are increasingly hard to find (at least in physical stores), but someone out there keeps buying them: The ancient format still makes up the majority of music sales in the U.S. And since album-length CDs are a whole lot more lucrative for the industry than iTunes singles, expect to see the industry cling to them as long it can get away with it.

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Have you bought a Kindle? Do you plan on buying a Kindle? If you answered yes to either question, you’re part of a not-that-small group: JP Morgan estimates that some 10 million Americans either own one of Amazon’s e-book readers or plan to get one soon. Meanwhile, whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its DX reader?

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Can the hype surrounding buzzy tech like Twitter, the Kindle and cloud computing get any louder? No, pronounces tech consultancy Gartner Inc., which has a very official-looking chart to make its case. But are you better off being on top of the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” or working your way up the “Slope of Enlightenment”? Who knows?

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Novelist Nicholson Baker loves books, but not Jeff Bezos’s device: “Amazon is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things…fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch.”

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t make it to his company’s earnings call today, but he did find time to apologize for Kindlegate–Amazon’s ham-fisted removal of George Orwell novels from his customers’ e-book readers. Great, right? Almost.

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Amazon’s Q2 was just what Wall Street was expecting–which in Wall Street’s perverse logic means that Wall Street will be disappointed. Amazon delivered net sales of $4.65 billion and earnings of 32 cents per share; consensus called for $4.67 billion and 32 cents. Jeff Bezos might have been able to allay investors’ worries, but he was a no-show for the conference call.

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Here’s another set of customers for AT&T: People who buy e-book readers from Plastic Logic, the would-be Kindle killer due out next year.

Privately held Plastic Logic says it will rely on AT&T to supply its gadgets with a wireless connection, in the same way that Sprint is the network provider for Amazon’s Kindle.

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Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?

Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.

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Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.

Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.

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