In a stat that almost got lost in the shuffle of Apple's big press day yesterday, CEO Steve Jobs reported that Apple customers have downloaded 130 million books from the iBookstore, though he didn't share any more specifics.

Visitors to the Amazon Kindle eBook page received a nice surprise the other day: the retailing giant unveiled a limited-time Amazon Sunshine promotion, where publishers designated some backlist titles for sale at .99, $1.99 and $2.99. Will variable pricing come down the road?

Your perception of more Kindles and Nooks on subways and planes and coffeehouses is not wrong: research-firm eMarketer says the U.S. installed base of reading devices has more than quadrupled since 2009, with 20 million eReaders in consumer hands by the end of this year.

Surprise, surprise: the hardcore power users in the eBook world are the same demographics as the hardcore power users in the physical-book word, as a report called Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) indicates both hardcore groups are dominated by women buying fiction.

It's an important milestone, even if the details are somewhat vague: Amazon says it now sells more eBooks than print books -- hardcover and paperback combined -- though revenue figures were conspicuously missing from the mix.