The NY Times features Readius, the first roll-up e-paper display due to hit the market next year. At $359, we’re still nowhere near a price that the average consumer will pick one up and at five inches diagonal with black and white text, we’re still nowhere near the size or resolution it will need to be if magazine publishers are to embrace it, but no matter…. it’s the type of product that could birth the magazine of the next generation.

Several months back, we made reference to the fact that traffic to Nxtbooks via Google is up tremendously. In fact, comparing April, May & June to January, February and March, we see more than a 400% increase in traffic via the big guy.

It’s possible that the rapid growth (which started in April but continues to increase daily) has to do with Google’s news that they’re now able to index text within Flash itself. As we’ve said, Nxtbook content has been indexed for some time via our hybrid index Flash technique. However, if Google is now indexing the Nxtbook itself, the result would be that Google would see the content twice on the page - inside the Nxtbook and within the XML. This double-shot of content seems to be having the desired effect for our publishers and their readers.

We recently had the good fortune to sponsor a great presentation by Hillary Bressler, an awesome Internet consultant to the travel industry. Afterward, Hillary asked us to convert her presentation to NXTbook format. Inside, you can see how the travel industry can plug into scented web sites and much more. Oh, and if you’re not up to speed with Shoshmosis, click here.

One the obvious benefits of digital publishing is that your publication doesn’t get stale and dog-eared. Looking through our traffic statistics from last month, a book that remained in our Top 20 list was the Official Fall 2006 Visitors Guide to New York City, which received tens of thousands of readers and had its best month ever — in February!

Do you know where you’re going on your NXT vacation? Use our new Google Maps Mash-up to visit more than one hundred and fifty different destinations!

Why should marketers (or anyone for that matter) blog? Christina Kerley posed that question on her blog last month. The answers and insights can be found here.

Web 2.0 is important to be sure and according to this report, magazine publishers are not currently doing enough to embrace the trend. That being said, we’re finding most our publishers are certainly talking about the tactics in this report, and the tactics make sense, so we tend to think that in a few years this will be the type of study we’ll use to mark what was the beginning of an important change in the industry.

We’ve seen many stories about how fast the custom publishing biz is growing, and sales graphs that run uphill tend to make management smile in all industries, but at the end of the day it’s the true success stories that help us to decide if what’s truly “trendy” will work in our world.

For this reason, we were thrilled to produce the digital edition of “The Custom Media Experience.” Short on graphs, long on great dialogue, these are the stories of how real publishers are finding real profits in the custom media channel.

Our friends from Mundologico have done it again. They worked with a wine company to produce a gorgeous NXTbook with very tasteful Flash animation. Very cool!

Here’s a great way to collect reader information - let them check the categories they’re interested in and send in their requests directly from the NXTbook!