We’re only about five weeks away from Christmas, so now’s as good a time as any to talk about (drum roll, please) e-books. Amazon kick-started the e-book market (with apologies to earlier e-book readers) with the introduction of the Kindle in the fall of 2007. Two years later, Barnes and Noble, IREX, and Sony announced new or updated e-book readers of their own.

The question becomes, which e-book reader is right for you? The truth is, they’re all very similar, so it should come down to what books their compatible book stores carry. Oh, and price, of course.

Smartsheet has already expanded its work management application with cool features like a way to crowdsource tasks. Now it’s adding a customer relationship management (CRM) service on top of that.

The goal of the Smartsheet Sales Pipeline Management app is to give small companies an easier transition from the tool many of them are using to track their sales leads — a spreadsheet. At some point, you’ll want something more sophisticated, but if you switch to a system like Salesforce.com, you’ll have to learn a whole new interface. With Smartsheet, on the other hand, you’re still storing your leads in a spreadsheet (er, a “Smartsheet”), but you can do more with them.

The Bellevue, Wash. company says its CRM tool has three major benefits. First, it’s easy to use — you can import your leads from a Google Spreadsheet with two clicks. The Google integration goes further, with the ability to log in using your Google account, attach Google Docs, import Google Contacts, and export your list back into Google Spreadsheets. Second, you can store everything else you need for the sale in your Smartsheet, such as related documents and emails. Third, you can use crowdsourcing to find new leads, where (using Smartsheet) you pay people small amounts of cash to find and type in other potential customers. This method should be much cheaper than buying a sales contact list.

Smartsheet chairman and co-founder Brent Frei comes from a CRM background, since he was previously co-founder and CEO at CRM company Onyx Software. On his blog, Frei says there are three trends that make his return to the CRM market a good move:

1. Simple CRM demand remains high
2. The Google Apps ecosystem needs 3^rd party small business applications
3. Google needs CRM solutions that make Google Apps more sticky

Smartsheet has raised more than $5.5 million in funding.

Amazon shares hit an all-time record -- Today’s $118.49 price is higher than the $400-plus days of 1999, because of splits in the years since. Today’s share price would be about $700 without the splits, says the Wall Street Journal. The Journal hauled out Mary Meeker, a big booster of Amazon and other dot-com stocks in the late 1990s who still follows the sector:

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker attributed Amazon’s recent surge to “continued success in adding new customers.”

She added that the rally “indicates that Amazon.com’s value proposition (lowest prices + best selection + great customer service) is succeeding in attracting consumers as they transition from offline to online in search of value.”

Another factor driving Amazon is sales of third-party products sold in its marketplace, a business once dominated by eBay Inc. Third-party units rose 32% from a year ago and 14% from the second quarter.

About 31% of Amazon’s sales now come from third-party merchants who sell goods on the site and give Amazon a percentage of revenue.

Wall Street, which refused to reward Yahoo for beating the street’s estimates a few days ago, went ga-ga for AMZN today, sending prices up 27% and boosting Amazon’s market value to $51.2 billion. VentureBeat will not make fun of the Kindle today.

Microsoft’s results add to continuing hopes for a tech-sector recovery – Microsoft is the General Motors of the tech sector, so today’s report of an 18% drop in quarterly results from last year could likely have triggered a selloff. Instead, investors bid Microsoft shares up 5.4% to $28.03 today. The Journal attributes it to consumer demand that offsets weak business spending.

Fifteen percent of adult Americans don’t have cellphones — Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times tracked down and interviewed people across America who have chosen to live — for now — without a mobile phone.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone — or even a landline — at home.

[Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times]

Netflix to roll out streaming-only service outside the U.S. — CEO Reed Hastings wouldn’t tell ReadWriteWeb in which countries Netflix will test streaming-only subscriptions that don’t require the customer to sign up for Netflix’ DVD-by-mail service. But those countries will not be the USA. Hastings said he wants to prove the business model before trying to serve it to the entire United States of America.

Windows 7 reader questions answered by our man Pogue — The guy is kind of touchy about his hatemail from Mac fans, but he takes one for the team today by answering the most broad, what-do-I-do questions about Windows 7 from his inbox. Send this to your parents.

As for PC pundits who trash-talk Windows Vista, former PC World editor Harry McCracken looked up all of the major reviewers’ write-ups of Vista from its debut days. All but one liked it. None forecast the sprawling, deep disinterest with which the general public responded. I’ll repeat my quickie review from yesterday: Windows 7 is a complicated operating system that I use to run a browser, in which I do all my work. Google’s Chrome OS is starting to appeal to me: A simpler, more stable browser with a Unix filesystem beneath it. For free. I’m not saying Windows is going to be gone from most desktops anytime soon, but it may be gone from mine.

This week brought news that Google and Microsoft are now incorporating Twitter into search results, solidifying the importance of incorporating social media content into search results. And startups like OneRiot have also recognized the value of tapping into the Twitter stream for search. Startup Kikin is doing the same with its newly launched plug-in.

Once installed, Kikin will integrate content from social networks (like Facebook and Twitter) and other social sites (like Amazon, eBay and YouTube) alongside results from search engines (like Google, Bing and Yahoo!). So if you search for chocolate labs on Google, Kikin will provide a pane of YouTube videos of chocolate labs and a Twitter stream of mentions of chocolate labs.

You can filter Twitter search results to just the Tweets from those users you are following. The pane also acts as a Twitter client where you can retweet Tweets and more. And the search results will tap into your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and search your news stream. Kikin lets you alter your settings so you can only see results from Twitter or YouTube.

While Google, Bing and other search engine embrace social media content in their search results, I’m a fan of Kikin’s plug-in because it lets you moderate what content you want to see and which content isn’t useful to you. You may not be interested in results from eBay for your searched, which you can disable (of course, it will still show up in your Google results). And I like that Kikin accesses your Facebook stream and YouTube videos. And if you tire of Kikin’s results, you can easily minimize the pane.

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Here’s our rundown of the week’s tech and business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

AVG launches its free antivirus suite as Microsoft crashes its party — “AVG Technologies has made itself into a familiar name on the Internet by giving users antivirus software at a pretty good price: free. Today, the company is announcing that the ninth version of its AVG antivirus software will be available in mid-October.”

How Fourth Wall Studios hid an artistic radio drama inside Halo 3:ODST — “Created through a collaboration of startup Fourth Wall Studios and Halo franchise developer Bungie, Sadie’s Story is a self-contained tale. It is a radio drama embedded within the world of Halo 3: ODST.”

Dell building an Android phone for the US (report) — “Since the phone will reportedly run on AT&T’s network, not only does this news add to Android’s roster of device manufacturers, but it also means the mobile OS will be on all four major mobile networks in the US.”

Review: First look at Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 on HTC Pure cell phone — “I tried it out on the new HTC Pure phone from AT&T, and the experience is a big step up from the crappy Windows Mobile experience of the past.”

Why Charles River Ventures sat out on Twitter’s latest round — “When Twitter raised its most recent round of funding at $1 billion, a few players were conspicuously absent, including Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures.”

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or just fun:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce strikes back after Apple defection: “We don’t have any regrets” — “Days after Apple announced that it would be quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce due to its opposition to greenhouse gas limits, the Chamber has very publicly shouted back.”

The iPhone finally gets Flash apps — but not Flash websites — “When Adobe announced the latest version of its Flash technology, a bunch of writers jumped on the fact that Flash 10.1 would eventually work on most major smartphones, except Apple’s iPhone. Looks like we spoke too soon. Sort of.”

U.S. private equity fundraising plunges 70 percent — “This means much less money will flow to technology start-ups over the next few years.”

Amazon debuts payment system for mobile phones — “Amazon Mobile Payments Service, or Amazon MPS as they’d prefer you call it, brings the comforting yellow Amazon button to mobile phone screens.”

Surprise! Dating site OKCupid finds white guys get more replies — “This week in slightly depressing confirmations that the online world is not so unlike the offline one: dating site OKCupid tracked the behavior of nearly 1 million users and found that race is correlated with whether people reply.”

Despite ongoing legal wranglings, Google is still on the offensive against critics of its book settlement. The latest salvo is an Op-Ed in the New York Times by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He goes over much the same ground that he articulated at a meeting with reporters on Wednesday: Google has done the hard work of digitizing more than 10 million books, while its competitors who oppose the settlement like Microsoft and Amazon have done nothing. “I guess they scanned 15 books,” Brin quipped at the meeting.

The main objection to the settlement is that it will give Google a monopoly on out-of-print, or orphan books. Brin swats that argument in his Op-Ed, writing:

The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns.

In other words, there is no choice in out-of-print books because for the most part they are simply not available other than in large research libraries.

Brin also points out that the settlement does not impose a compulsory license on unclaimed works, only a default license which can later be changed. Furthermore, he argues, as he did at the meeting, that the settlement is not anti-competitive because it does not preclude other companies from striking similar deals. In fact, it sets a precedent for them to do so.

Everyone agrees that digitizing these books is a good idea, and will help unlock the information hidden away in them. Brin quotes liberally from out-of-print books in his Op-Ed to make his point.

But Google is not digitizing these books so it can sell copies of them. They are out of print for a reason. There is no market for them as whole books. Their value lies in cutting them up into snippets and relevant excerpts, and showing those snippets along with search ads to people looking for related information. The reason they are valuable to Google is because they are a rich source of high quality information that will improve its search results, and in fact give them an information advantage over other search engines without equal access to the world’s books.

Brin’s attitude is that if Microsoft or Amazon want a similar corpus of digital information, they should go scan their own out-of-print books. Of course, there are other efforts such as the not-for-profit Internet Archive’s (which has scanned 1.6 million books), but they don’t have the same resources as Google.

The response, however, would be that the settlement gives Google a free pass against any legal liability for orphan works still under copyright protection.

On Wednesday I asked Brin, why not just open the settlement to other book digitizers to afford them the same protections? He said that would be “legally impossible.” After all, those rights aren’t Google’s to extend. But what about the Author’s Guild? Would it be willing to apply the same terms to other companies and book digitization efforts to help open up and distribute out-of-print books even further? How great would it be to be able to download millions of such books for free (or a token fee of $1) onto your Kindle and other devices?

Everybody wants to see that world happen. But first this legal hurdle must be overcome, and second other organizations must catch up in their book scanning efforts or Google should do the right thing and choose to license its digital book database to other companies that don’t compete in search like Amazon. Making all the world’s books accessible in digital form through more than just Google doesn’t have to be a unicorn fantasy.

Photo credit: Flickr/Eggybird

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Engine Yard, a company that helps developers deploy and manage web applications built with the Ruby on Rails programming framework (which is popular for fast web development), has raised $19 million in a third venture round.

This brings the San Francisco company’s total funding to $37.5 million. As a point of comparison, to about 10 times the money raised by competitor Heroku. Both companies offer services to take the pain out of launching a Rails app after you’ve built it, in Engine Yard’s case hosted private on infrastructure or, more recently, on a service called Engine Yard Cloud that uses Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Both companies have described the difference as a focus on service (Engine Yard) versus a focus on automation (Heroku), though the Engine Yard Cloud moves further in the direction of automation.

Engine Yard says it has more than 600 customers. In June, it also added support for JRuby, an version of the Ruby programming language that integrates with Java.

The new funding comes from DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates.