If you missed the NXTbook media demo session at the Folio: SHOW last, fear not! Click here to view the NXTbook version (sadly, without audio narration) of What’s Next for Digital Editions?

At our presentation at the Folio: SHOW, NXTbook president Spencer Ewald summed up social media by saying that publishers needed care about it because a. it’s big b. it’s cheap and c. it ain’t going away.

One week later, Conde Nast announces that they’ve purchased Reddit, one of the up and comers in the social media space. If you can’t afford to buy a tech-start-up (or start your own), just give us a call. NXTbook content can easily be submitted to any of the major social media websites.

As we head into the Holiday weekend, it only makes sense to point out this adorable Halloween fun and recipe guide Pillsbury produced in NXTbook format. Downright adorable, in a kind of scary sort of way.

If you’re a publisher, you might like to see how making a NXTbook allows you to tap into the social internet. Since this book was released last week, Pillsbury has enjoyed thousands of reads because sites like this one, this one and this one are sharing the link, and here’s a user that’s saved the guide in their del.icio.us links.

The moral of the story? If you have great content and share the link, you’ll get more readers.

What a week at the Folio: SHOW in New York. Much of the NXTbook team was on hand to meet and greet with a lot of the top magazine publishers in the US (and beyond!). For us, it was a great opportunity to re-connect with some of our best customers. I haven’t checked with the rest of the team yet, but personally, I was able to spend at least a minute with people from Edutopia, Upshot Magazine, University Business and Today’s Officer, and the rest of our team was as busy - if not busier!- than I was. And when we weren’t talking to customers, we were talking to potential customers. We learned about dozens of great publications and hope to bring them into the NXTbook fold in the coming weeks.

If you’re into blogger-stalking (and who isn’t?), you were in your glory at the show. Rex Hammock, Paul Conley and Jeff Jarvis were all there, as was blog ring-leader Dorian Benkoil (who let me pummel him with NXTbook facts and figures! (sorry, Dorian!)). Heck, they even had Lockhart Steele in the house!

Thanks to Tony, Kelly, Gina, Allyson and the entire Red7 team who made the show a big hit for everyone!

There’s been some promising technology buzz in the past week or so which supports the idea that the way we’re presenting NXTbooks is only going to get better and better in the coming months.

First up, our good friends at Adobe have released their own reader for Digital Editions. Forgetting the fact that a proprietary reader is not what anybody is interested in these days, if you view one of the few books in their library that is done in XHTML, you’ll see some very slick resizing and reflowing of text (similar to Times Reader). Very nice.

Meanwhile, Idio is poised to release a let-the-reader- make-it-themselves-digital-magazine for the digital edition market. While their business model could be a little bit in question (we don’t see many publishers just handing content over to a competitor without a very generous rev. share plan and Idio is looking for content writers (which don’t come free)), the technology being used has potential, and - like the Adobe solution - we’ll be checking to see if and how these advancements can make the NXTbook even better for our readers.

Flexible displays that have been a part of many a sci-fi movie are finally here.  Plastic Logic yesterday announced that they will be revealing a flexible 150ppi SVGA active-matrix display at the Plastic Electronics 2006 conference in Frankfurt.  The display is based on E Ink technology, which is already being used in devices such as the Sony Reader.  However, unlike those devices, this display can be rolled and folded just like a thick piece of paper while still being readable.  The company’s goal is to start mass-producing these displays in 2008, which means those cool roll-up displays seen in movies could soon be seen on a beach near you.

Chances are you’ve heard of RSS. Chances are also great you haven’t streamlined your RSS strategy, yet. And why would you? After all, last year Yahoo reported that only 4% of Net users were gobbling up their news via RSS readers like Bloglines.

But next year expects to be the big year for RSS - Internet Explorer, Windows, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail & MySpace - in short, the big guys of the Web, are all planning to integrate RSS readers into their product. And when they do, the masses will figure out what some of us already have: there is no better way to consume massive amounts of information than with an RSS reader.

NXTbook isn’t waiting until 2007 to make sure our publishers catch this wave, though. Next week at the Folio show, we’ll be showing off two great RSS tools - custom designed to make sure that readers get digital edition content in their RSS feeds.

In the coming weeks, you can expect a web page or two that explains the features in detail, but why wait? Visit us at Booth 511 at Folio or drop us a line at info@nxtbookmedia.com, subject line: “Tell me more about RSS.”

Heading into next week’s FOLIO show, we wanted to produce a single NXTbook that would incorporate the best of the best - the coolest stuff our customers have done with NXTbook technology. We wanted to fill it up with Flash, video, audio, bellybands, tabs, forms and more.

Well, thanks to Scott Schwartz, our Production Director, the book is finished. It’s called the Best of NXTbook and if you’re trying to figure out how to truly optimize your digital edition, there’s no better place to start than right here.

In the past few months, we’ve found ourselves doing more and more work in the education market, which makes sense: colleges spend a lot of money for printing and most of their materials go to an audience that is - essentially - online all the time.

In the coming week, our new micro-portal at the University Business website will go live, but because you’re reading our blog, you can get a sneak peek of it by clicking here.

If you ask us what makes NXTbook Media different from other digital publishers, one of the most important answers is our unrelenting dedication to developing a product which can be embraced by the Social Internet. However, we’ll be the first to admit that if you don’t know what the “Social Internet” is, that answer might not impress you very much.

The good folks at Spannerworks have just put out a dynamite short book called “What is Social Media?” and were kind enough to let us release it in NXTbook format. Simply put, it’s one of the most informative, concise guides we’ve seen on the subject and can quickly get you up to speed on the power of the Social Internet. Click here for a great read.