At Kindle Nation Daily, we do a lot of tasting so that you won’t ruin your appetite on morsels unworthy of your palate. Here are a few tasty tidbits to provide the flavor of what’s going on in the Kindlesphere today:

• Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors, and, like me, a frequent contributor to the Teleread blog. For those of us who follow the peregrinations of Steve Jobs’ cat-herding efforts to wring collusive price-fixing and a market advantage out of the Agency 5 megapublishers, Adin’s Teleread piece today, “The Decline & Fall of the Agency 5,” is a must read.
• Publishing exec Joe Wikert’s Kindleville blog has gone the way of so many 2007-2008 Kindle blogs, but he’s opened up a new once-a-week iPadHound blog, and he continues to provide consistently interesting if occasionally snarky perspectives in his 2020 Publishing blog, including one this morning on eReaders and Digital Bookstores. (I’m no shrink, and I love and have blogged about Joe’s ideas, but I have to admit that I wonder if his perspective might be tinged with some sort of personal embitterment toward Amazon when I read a discussion of the Kindle and iBooks Stores that makes no mention of relative catalog count, which as of this morning appears to stand at 509,985 for the Kindle Store and somewhere between “over 46,000” and “about 60,000” for theiBooks Store.)
• Speaking of new general ereader initiatives by long-time Kindle observers, you’ll want to check out Len Edgerly’s Reading Edge podcast, Andrys Basten’s E-Reader World Blog, and, of course, the granddaddy of ’em all, Paul K. Biba’s TeleRead. The first two are new because they are relatively new, and Teleread is new because, despite having been around since the 90s, it’s full of new content each and every day. (By the way, it was Len to the best of my knowledge who coined the excellent word “Kindlesphere” that I throw around so liberally, and if you see him around Harvard Square this week be sure to join me in congratulating him on his daughter’s wedding Saturday.) 
• Speaking again of Teleread, contributor and offsite blogger Joanna has the scoop this morning on the new Kobo reader becoming available in stores, in Canada.
• Speaking of Kobo, thanks to Kindle Nation citizen Nina S., who wrote in with this Kobo Kwery: “Hello, Stephen… As a Gmail user, you may have seen the ads along the right side of the screen. Today, as I was reading the Tuesday Kindle Nation, I saw Kobo, a provider of ebooks. I clicked on the ad (curious person that I am), and read as much as I could on the website about what Kobo is and what it provides. But I am a bit puzzled, and perhaps you have the answer. I couldn’t discern if the books are in mobi format. Are you acquainted with this site? If so, what’s your “take” on it?   Glad to know you came through the surgery so well.   Nina” Thanks, Nina. I’ll admit that although I have downloaded the free Kobo app on my iPad, I have yet to spend tons of time with it, so I will shy away from sharing a “take” too hastily, with apologies, but I can tell you that Kobo books, which are in one of the many occasionally overlapping ePub formats, are not intended, as yet, to be read on your Kindle. (Which is not to say that there are not ways….).