The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply.

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Prime View International, a Taiwanese company that makes an e-readers display part, said today it would purchase E-Ink, a company that provides the digital ink technology in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, for $215 million. The two companies have been partners in developing the Sony and Amazon e-reader products, and the deal highlights PVI’s attempt to own the top provider of an essential technology for the growing e-reader market.

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In theory, the RSS reader is a great idea. Many years ago, as blogs became an ever-larger part of my news diet, I got addicted to Bloglines, one of the first popular RSS programs. I used to read a dozen different news sites every day, going to each site every so often to check whether something fresh had been posted.

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Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle 2 is slimmer, faster and has longer battery life than its predecessor. But the newly launched e-book reader falls short when it comes to how well it displays text, say some users.

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Amazon still hasn’t said how many of its Kindle e-book readers have sold. But here’s one true sign of the gadget’s growing popularity: People are protesting it on several fronts.

On Tuesday, a group representing members of the National Federation of the Blind and the American Association of People with Disabilities staged a protest over limitations in the Kindle’s read-aloud feature. Last month, Amazon (AMZN) said it would amend the feature to give publishers and authors the ability restrict it at the request of the Authors Guild, which says voice performances of books require separate contracts. During the protest outside the New York headquarters of Authors Guild, protesters chanted, “Stop the greed, we want to read.”

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Is the digital savior of the sagging magazine industry finally in sight?

On Wednesday, Fujitsu Frontech began selling the world’s first color e-paper e-book reader. Available on April 20 in Japan only, the gadget costs 99,970 yen, or more than $1,000.

Until now, e-books like the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle and Sony (SNE) Reader have been limited to black and white or shades of gray, making them OK for reading plain books and newspapers that like to use stipple drawings, but not great for colorful print media such as magazines.

But if color e-book readers catch on, one theory holds, magazines and other media that currently print on dead trees would have a cheap way to distribute–and charge for–the colorful content and ads that marketers will pay for. Recently, publisher Hearst said it wanted to dive further into the e-book business.

Fujitsu’s color e-paper technology, first unveiled in 2007, is different from the technology created by the Massachusetts-based E Ink that’s used by the Sony and Amazon. But E Ink says it is working on color displays, too.

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On Dec. 14, Google’s RSS feed reader application, Google Reader, introduced a new way for Google-defined “friends” to see your “shared” feed items. At that point, the feature caused this reporter to blow a fuse, because I realized Reader was letting competing bloggers automatically see my shared feed items.

Then, only a couple of others wondered about the move. But this past week, more fuses have been blowing, as Reader users discovered that business competitors, politically sensitive relatives, ex-lovers and others were getting access to items that Reader users thought they were only sharing with selected confidantes.

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