“Kindle is just one example of a host of hot tech items customers can get at Staples this holiday season,” said Jevin Eagle, executive vice president of merchandising and marketing at Staples. “From our hands-on displays to our knowledgeable associates, Staples makes buying technology easy any time of year.”

The following models will be available at these prices:

• Kindle ($139.00) – Wi-Fi, 6″ diagonal

• Kindle 3G ($189.00) – Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″ diagonal

• Kindle DX ($379.00) – Free 3G, 9.7″ diagonal (available at Staples mid-November 2010)

Amazon’s move to sell Kindles at Staples will broaden the already wide reach of the Kindle marketplace and promote its technology to new consumers who might be less frequent Web visitors. Of course, if you are reading this piece and you’d like to stock up on Kindles as holiday gifts without leaving your home or office, we hope you will support Kindle Nation by using the links just above to place your orders!

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Random Rising. Random House’s ebook sales appear not to have collapsed as a consequence of its decision to abstain from the agency model price-fixing scheme in which all of the other Big Six publishers have colluded with Apple’s Steve Jobs. Random House ebooks are not available in Apple’s iBooks store, which is one factor in keeping iBooks’ market share at what we expect is probably the single digits. But Random House, according to a recent interview with  CEO Markus Dohle, “expects electronic books to contribute more than 10 percent of its U.S. revenue next year.”

Dohle told German magazine Der Spiegel, via Reuters, that “e-book revenue had already jumped to 8 percent in the United States and had turned into a new growth driver for the publisher of Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stieg Larsson.”

The article quoted Dohle saying, “We’re at 8 percent in the United States currently…it rose by leaps and bounds. I could well imagine that we get beyond 10 percent next year.”

Moreover, he considers e-book technology “a major opportunity” that will allow the company to build “record growth”and predicts that his company’s share of e-books as revenue will likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015.

Meanwhile, readers who want to read Random House ebooks on their iPads, iPhones, iPod Touches, BlackBerries, computers, and Android devices can do so easily by downloading the free Kindle apps for these devices and shopping in the Kindle Store. “Dohle said he was not sure about Apple’s [agency] model which forces publishers to determine the end-consumer price, unlike for printed books which are priced by retailers,” according to Reuters.

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Piracy Fears Overblown? Consumer demand for pirated e-books did not grow in 2010, according to a Teleread piece by Eric Hellman: “Online piracy of ebooks has been a persistent worry for book publishers who look at the successes and failures of other media that have moved to digital forms. A surprising number and variety of ebooks are easily availabile on file sharing websites and peer-to-peer networks that use bitTorrent and similar protocols.”

In his study, Hellman used Google trends to determine the demand for a particular pirated e-book title by giving it “keywords that reproduce these searches.”

Moreover, Hellman describes his 2010 findings, compared to 2008: 

To eliminate seasonal variations, I computed the year over prior year growth of pirate ebook search activity. The resulting plot is quite smooth. After a few years of 100% per year growth, 2008 showed a clear slowing of growth. This slowing of growth continued up to the beginning of 2010, and then flat-lined. Since February of 2010, the growth of interest in pirated ebooks has stopped completely.

Backlist 101? While the Kindle catalog has been growing dramatically this year, there are still many miles to go when it comes to titles by non-English language authors and backlist titles by important writers in any language. MediaBistro’s e-Book Newser, observes that “while Amazon offers 101 books by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, only one is available on Kindle.” That book is literary criticism with a large dose of cultural analysis, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and “Les Miserables” (Princeton University Press).

Peruvian novelist and political activist Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature the other day, according to the Nobel committee, “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

• Videos from the defining moments of the Bush presidency, including President Bush’s inspiring speech to 9/11 rescue workers, intimate Bush family movies, and a special introduction to the edition by the President himself
• Handwritten letters from President Bush’s personal correspondence
• Full texts of President Bush’s most important speeches, including his addresses to the nation about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and his Second Inaugural
• More than 50 additional photographs not contained in the print edition

Frankfurt Book Fair. Publishers Weekly has a story on the recently concluded 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair’s embrace of the e-book community. It seems the book fair has evolved into a multi-platform e-book and new media conference.

On one panel that included Brian Murray, CEO, HarperCollins; Evan Schnittman, managing director, Bloomsbury; Andrew Savikas, v-p, O’Reilly Media; and Rick Joyce, CMO, Perseus, “all of the panelists noted explosive growth in e-book revenues,” said the report.

“Murray said e-books made up about 9% of HarperCollins’ total revenue, but when that number was adjusted to filter out things like children’s books or other materials not easily consumed digitally, closer to 20% of trade title revenue was now derived from e-books.”

“This year, e-books and digital are looked at more as an opportunity than a threat.”

Ginsberg Gibberish? Elsewhere a PW blogger Craig Morgan Teicher warns lovers of poetry to beware of formatting flaws on e-books. The writer recently—and excitedly—bought Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems in e-book format only to discover missing and inaccurate indentations.

“The liniation of the poems in the book was all messed up,” Teicher writes elegantly. “Doesn’t a trade publisher as big as HarperCollins have the money to pay a professional to do a bit of extra work on an e-book for a figure as big as Ginsberg, especially when there’s a movie about him in theaters now? What’s going on?”

Amazon to Launch Android App Store. Just when observers are beginning to tire of endless predictions that Google Editions — when it is launched at mid-century — will be the trojan horse that allows Google to rise to dominance over the world of ebooks, it appears that Amazon is running a rather elegant trojan horse play of its own.