I got a $25 app card with my iTouch, and forgot about it. However when we had guests over last night they had a great iPhone game, and Delaney loved it. He asked me to get it, so today when I was looking for a charger, I found the card, entered it, and bought Delaney's game. It's Flight Control, if you care.

Then I realized that I needed an expense application. I really liked the one I had for the G1, which let me take photos of my receipts and email them to myself. I figured "there's an app for that" on the iPhone, and started looking.

Mobile Receipt looks good, and there are a few more. I think I'll try that one after seeing a YouTube video if it in action. Nice to see how it works.

I'll entertain other suggestions, and I've asked for a few on Twitter.

What’s the cost of e-books? It’s an interesting question that I have always wondered. I found this account of the cost of books, and it makes sense to me. I think this is about what I expect.

It is somewhat confirmed by this section on CoolerBooks: What aren’t ebooks cheaper? However Coolerbooks, which is selling another eReader (in color) called the Cool-er Reader, isn’t giving a huge discount. Wicked Prey, the new John Sandford novel, sells for $22.36 from Cooler books (in ebook form). If you had their e-reader, you’d get 25% off, or it would cost $16.77. That’s the cost from Amazon for the hardcover.

The Kindle edition is $9.99.

I know Amazon takes a loss on some books, but if they can offer the hardcover for $16, can’t Coolerbooks to better? After all, it’s without the paper cost, which isn’t much, call it $3, but that adds up. It seems to me that perhaps Coolerbooks, who says they’ll never sell at a loss, isn’t necessarily disclosing what level of profit they want.

By my reckoning, the publisher's cost of the book is about $10. So Amazon is at cost, but I'd think that other retailers could sell books in the $12-15 range and make a profit. If not, then perhaps they're not doing  a good job.

I was annoyed recently with Amazon offering a book I wanted to buy, brand new from an author, for $14. I wrote them and they responded saying the publisher sets the price. I wrote the author, and got a response back saying Amazon was playing games. Of course the publisher sets the price. At $29.99!!

This was a best selling author, fairly successful, and I heard that he has no input into the price of the book. Based on some reading I've been doing of author blogs, this seems right, but it also seems that no one wants to really talk about it. I think they are concerned about their relationships with publishers, and perhaps they are happy with the arrangement.

I don't know if I'll ever get anything published, but I am tempted to just find a good editor and go it alone. I might not make any money, but I would like to have the control to charge what I think are fair prices.

XBRL is yet another use of XML, this time for financial reporting. It is supposed to be in place for large companies, and like most other requirements, it will eventually migrate down to smaller companies as more tools become available and cheaper. Putting the onus on large companies to implement new standards makes sense since they can better afford it and they often have the most complex reporting, so the standard and process truly gets tested well.

Mark Cuban had a great idea in that it should be used to track the bailout, which I tend to agree with. Make this information public, put it in a standard format like XBRL and then anyone can consume it, build reports, make it easier for the citizens of this country, who are funding this bailout, to understand what is happening.

More and more I am seeing new uses of XML, which are really just subsets of the structure that XML provides. A decade after I first saw XML being pushed at the 1998 Microsoft PDC in Denver, it truly is permeating information technology more and more. I thought it was an amazing idea, much like the ATM protocol in networking, but both of them seemed to have a lot of overhead and I wasn't sure they'd get truly widespread adoption.

I was wrong, at least for XML. ATM is used, but pretty much only by large, backbone telecoms, while XML is everywhere.

I think XML isn't suitable for all applications, but it makes great sense as an interface, especially an expandable one that exchanges data between systems or applications and needs some flexibility. It hasn't been a focus of mine over the years, but more and more I think I should dig more into XML and better understand how it works since it's likely to become integral in some part of most applications in the future.