The International Digital Publishing Forum, the trade and standards association for the eBook industry, has released its tally of the best-selling eBooks of 2005. Heading up the list is the tome based on the top grossing movie of last year, “Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith.” Viewing the final installment of George Lucas’s space adventure wasn’t enough for many, it seems; they had to read about Anakin Skywalker’s final steps into the dark side electronically as well. In addition to popular fiction, the list includes a dictionary and thesaurus, the bible, romance, and titles from independent publishers like Rosetta Books and Fictionwise.com.

Last Day of Work has released Village Sim v1.1 for Palm OS. This update features long awaited improvements based on customers’ suggestions and includes clickable tombstones, new behaviors like evaluating and repairing huts, as well as improved stability and gameplay. Village Sim is a village simulator where you care for and nurture a displaced tribe of little people by teaching them the basics of survival. The object of Village Sim is to grow a small village in your Palm OS device: they have food needs, housing needs, technologies to research and diseases to fight. Unique among games for mobile devices is the “real-time” nature of growing a virtual tribe in your handheld device. Unless a player pauses the game, villagers will continue to live and prosper, or sicken and die, depending on how often the player monitors and takes care of the people in the village.

Today, Palm will showcase a brand-new member of the Palm Treo smartphone family–the highly anticipated Treo 700w smartphone, which takes advantage of Verizon Wireless’ BroadbandAccess service on its EV-DO network. The Treo 700w smartphone is the first Treo smartphone to run the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, bringing the hallmark Palm ease of use to Windows Mobile for the first time. It combines a great mobile phone with broadband-like access to wireless email and business applications. Palm executives will participate in several CES panel sessions and the new Treo 700w smartphone will go head-to-head with the best products CES has to offer in PC Magazine’s Last Gadget Standing competition.

For a closer look at Palm’s tasty new Treo 700w, visit the product site directly.

Palm continues to grow its accessories business with the introduction of more than 25 accessories for the Palm Treo 700w smartphone from Verizon Wireless, including a Bluetooth headset, Wi-Fi card, GPS solution, and a variety of professional cases. With the new Windows Mobile-based Treo smartphone, Palm will capture a new audience of accessory users, enabling it to grow the addressable smartphone and accessories market share.

Pete Townshend has warned iPod users that they could end up with hearing problems as bad as his own if they don’t turn down the volume of the music they are listening to on earphones. Townshend, 60, guitarist in the 60s band The Who, said his hearing was irreversibly damaged by years of using studio headphones and that he now is forced to take 36-hour breaks between recording sessions to allow his ears to recover. He said on his Web site, “Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK… But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead.”

In an advisory, RIM warned that a corrupt TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) attachment could be used in an attack that would stop a user from being able to view attachments. The bug was first flagged by a researcher known as “FX” during a presentation at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, where multiple RIM BlackBerry products came under the security microscope. Even as RIM downplayed the risk as a denial-of-service condition, the U.S.-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) said the vulnerabilities discussed by “FX” could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the BlackBerry Attachment Service.

Sony announced plans for its first high-definition Blu-ray DVD players and recorders aimed at the international market. The company also provided a look at its broader 2006 electronics lineup. Sony’s most anticipated high-definition product remains the PlayStation 3, which is still expected to be released this spring, at least in Japan. But the company said Wednesday that it will also release, in the summer, an as-yet-unpriced Blu-ray player called the BDP-S1, and, by the end of the year, an external computer drive that will play and record the high-definition discs.

After several years of distributing Apple Computer’s iTunes software with its new PCs, Hewlett-Packard is shifting its allegiances to rival RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service. The computer maker’s decision to drop Apple has been widely expected, after the company said that it would stop distributing an HP-branded version of the iPod. The deal marks a new direction for HP, which had seen its entertainment products overshadowed by the power of Apple’s own brand. Rhapsody will now be the default music-playing software on HP’s new PCs and laptops, and beginning in spring 2006, HP customers will get a free 30-day trial subscription to RealNetworks’ music subscription service.

When it comes to making music even more portable, car stereo makers are thinking small. They’re adding slots for tiny thumb drives to car stereo systems on display at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The USB (universal serial bus) drives are about the size of a keychain and cost as little as $20 at stores such as Target and Wal-Mart. Many people pop them into their PCs and use them to store computer files. But thumb drives can store digital tunes as easily as spreadsheets–making them a great alternative to stacks of CDs.