Most of us associate Netflix with those red envelopes containing DVDs, but Netflix’s members are now watching more content streamed over the Internet than delivered by mail. Because of that change, Netflix is now offering a $7.99-per-month plan that eschews DVDs entirely in favor of unlimited streaming. Simultaneously, Netflix raised the prices of the DVD-delivery plans, with the 1- and 2-disc-at-a-time plans increasing by $1 per month. Although Netflix has continually increased the amount of content available for streaming, only about a fifth of the movies and TV shows in our queue are available for streaming.

After seven years, The Beatles have finally come to the iTunes Store. Unless you’re replacing worn-out LPs or cassettes, this is probably an excuse mostly to watch the video of The Beatles’ first live concert in the United States.

Amazon.com has announced that Kindle newspapers and magazines will be available within Kindle apps in the coming weeks, and more interestingly, that lending of Kindle titles will appear later this year, following in Barnes & Noble's footsteps with the Nook. Each book can be lent once to another Kindle device for 14 days, and you cannot read the book while it's lent out. Publishers will determine which books are lendable. Will Apple do something similar with the iBookstore? Seems unlikely at the moment.

One iTunes library, one family: is it even possible? Michael E. Cohen and Adam Engst run through all the ways of setting up an iTunes media server for a family, none of which are perfect, but one of which may be what you need.

In the company's continuing effort to make the Kindle file format the de facto standard for electronic books (which should not be allowed to happen, given how inadequate the format is for anything but straight text), Amazon.com has launched "Kindle for the Web," which lets site owners embed Kindle book previews on their sites. Realistically, Kindle for the Web is just a way to encourage people to preview the first chapter of a Kindle-format book in a Web browser, after which they can purchase the ebook for reading on a Kindle device or in Kindle software on a Mac, iOS device, or Windows-based PC. It's a smart move on Amazon's part, and notably different from how Apple has restricted access to the iBookstore to the iBooks app.

iTunes 10.0.1 adds a Ping sidebar that shows contextual and recent activity, along with Ping buttons that make it easy to "like" or comment on a selected or playing track. The changes make Ping significantly easier to use, but don't yet provide any significant reason to use it.

Apple has shoehorned every feature short of the kitchen sink into the increasingly misnamed iTunes - surely that means the program is a classic example of bloatware? Or is it? Kirk McElhearn, who has written numerous articles and books about iTunes, examines the charges that iTunes is bloated to see if they're valid.

Our new ebook about iTunes 10 combines the convenience of a FAQ with the thoroughness of the Take Control approach to give readers quick access to expert iTunes advice.

Sure, it's easy to view EPUB-formatted ebooks in iBooks on an iOS device, but what if you want to look at one quickly on your Mac? iTunes won't help, and Adam's new favorite tool for this is a Firefox add-on called EPUBReader.

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.

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? [Updated 12 March 2012: With Barnes & Noble purchasing the Borders trademarks and intellectual property, I agreed to update the previous non-functional URL that previously pointed at Borders to point to the equivalent page on Barnes & Noble. -Adam]

The new Apple TV is a black box a quarter the size of its predecessor, offering streaming content, no requirement to sync to a computer, and 99-cent TV show rentals to the living room.

Apple can't resist updating iTunes whenever new iPods come out, but this time the changes are fairly minimal other than the addition of the Ping social networking service, aimed at making it easier to discover new music by connecting you to your friends and favorite artists.

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.

The Netflix app for iPad has gone universal, so you can now stream movies directly to your iPhone or iPod touch.