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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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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One downside of being the world’s most talked-about start-up: You become an irresistible target for hackers. And now someone’s made off with a pile of Twitter’s corporate documents, apparently with Google’s unwitting assistance. Time to for a realistic solution to the cloud computing security problem.

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Common sense tells you that the CD is a vanishing artifact. Slightly more surprising: Music consumers–or at least, people who are willing to pay for music–are disappearing, too. So says the NPD Group, which estimates that 13 million Americans stopped buying music last year.

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Amazon’s data-free claim that it posted its “best ever” holiday season this month has gotten a deservedly skeptical reception. But here’s one vote in favor of Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce giant: A customer satisfaction poll that singles out just Amazon and Netflix for praise.

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Americans spent billions on CDs last year. But big-box retailers are increasingly uninterested in selling the discs in their stores. Newest data point: Borders Group, which has cut its music inventory by 30 percent in the last year.

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