It's a topic that many of us are struggling with these days - where and how should we acquire the books that entertain, educate, and enliven our worlds? In this MacNotables podcast, Andy Ihnatko and Adam range widely across the pros and cons of the many possibilities, bemoaning the loss of small bookstores and library budgets while simultaneously acknowledging the many advantages of ebooks. No hard and fast answers, sorry, but we think you'll enjoy the conversation.

In this MacNotables podcast, what starts as a discussion between Adam and host Chuck Joiner about the Matias Tactile Pro 3 keyboard morphs into a look at some of the trials and tribulations we go through to keep publishing TidBITS with a small staff and equivalently small budget. A hint - it's all about having good technology behind the scenes. But it's still not easy.

Not to be left out of the price war between Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, Borders has dropped the prices of a number of ebook reading devices that work with the Borders online store. Their E-Ink-based Kobo eReader is now only $129, the Sony Pocket and Sony Touch (also using E-Ink screens) are $119 and $139 respectively, and Aluratek Libre - which has an LCD screen - is on sale for only $99 through 14 September 2010. Borders also has a pair of Android-based tablets with color touch screens coming in a month or so, the Velocity Micro Cruz Reader for $199 and the Velocity Micro Cruz Tablet for $299. The question is, are they enough cheaper than an iPad?

One of Gmail's most ballyhooed features is its excellent spam filter. But having reduced spam annoyance to a dull roar, Google has moved on to another troubling inbox management issue: even "legitimate" e-mail contains plenty of both wheat and chaff. Google's latest Gmail feature, dubbed Priority Inbox, aims to make inbox management a bit easier. Through its own analysis and your manual training (much like you would train a spam filter), Priority Inbox learns which messages are more likely to require immediate attention, and which can wait. The feature splits your Inbox into "important and unread" messages, "starred" messages, and "everything else." Google says it will roll out the new option to users of Gmail and Google Apps alike over the coming days. We'll see how it works when it appears in our accounts.

Apple has announced that iTunes U content downloads have rolled past the 300 million mark. iTunes U doesn't get much press, but the division of the iTunes Store brings together audio and video educational content from hundreds of universities; it now contains over 350,000 lectures and other content from institutions of higher learning around the globe. Apple deserves kudos for providing iTunes U content for free, and if you haven't yet checked out the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store, we encourage you to do so.

Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman spends more than 1,000 words talking about video codecs. But it's not all nerd-speak. MPEG LA has announced that it will never charge royalties for free H.264 videos. That's important because HTML5 video, which lets you watch Web video without requiring plug-ins like Flash, is currently difficult for publishers and consumers alike, with different browsers providing limited support for different codecs. While H.264 - which Apple already supports in both Safari and Mobile Safari - already has buy-in from major media companies like CNN, Major League Baseball, and YouTube, this announcement could very well spark a unification of HTML5 video formats.

Garmin is voluntarily recalling about 1.25 million nüvi GPS devices, nearly 800,000 of which were sold in the United States. The recall is to address a problem with the battery that could cause the device to overheat and become a fire hazard. Affected units include the nüvi 200W, 250W, 260W, and 7xx (where xx is a two-digit number), though apparently not the 255W we reviewed in 2008. Fewer than 10 cases of overheating have been identified, but Garmin will replace the battery and insert a spacer before returning your GPS, free of charge.

Seton Hall University, which is providing free iPads to all fulltime students, has now announced a collaboration with We-Envision.com, creators of the Art Authority for iPad app, under which art history students will use the app as an integral part of classes this semester. Seton Hall's pilot program is aimed at understanding how the iPad can be used to aid, extend, and transform the traditional learning environment, and it will be interesting to see how Art Authority enables the students to go beyond the usual uses of the iPad as a stand-in for a paper textbook.

"Sorry for forgetting your birthday, Grandma!" It turns out that the iOS calendar won't display birthdays of people whose first birthday was more than 77 years ago. This is true only of birthdays in the special Birthdays calendar that's generated automatically from birthday information in Address Book. The only workaround for the moment is to create birthday events in a different calendar, though it's probably not worth much effort, since Apple will undoubtedly fix the bug in the next iOS revision by searching for "77" in the code and replacing it with a larger number. Thanks to reader Carl Pohle for alerting us to this one!