Special Instagram-edition. (Photo: flickr.com/diegorusso

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer earned $68.6 million last year. Think about that while you're scraping together change to refill your metrocard. :( [Bloomberg]

Rumor has it that Facebook is looking into buying mobile map app Waze for up to $1B. Waze really gets around--last we heard it was dating Apple. [TechCrunch]

Microsoft might be mulling a $1 billion purchase of Nook Media LLC, its joint venture with Barnes and Noble. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, guys. [TechCrunch]

Time and Google have teamed up to produce Timelapse, a new package that shows how the Earth's surface has changed over the last thirty years. (Spoiler: Not for the better, if you like nature.)  [Time]

Can't patent software in New Zealand any more, sorry. [Forbes]

It wasn't so long ago that the Nook was the key to Barnes & Noble's future. Now the bookseller is planning to back off of its efforts to sell its own e-reader, and is working on strengthening partnerships with tablet suppliers. [NYT]

It's not that Julian Assange isn't giving interviews—it's just that he's leading a busy life inside the Ecuadorian government's London embassy, and it's a question of fitting reporters in. [Ars Technica]

Kara Swisher leans into the backlash against Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's new book. [AllThingsD]

In case you can't wait for the competing biopics currently in production, here's what it's like to go on a double-date with John McAfee. [PandoDaily]

JEFF BEZOS KNOWS.

It's a common refrain (one that'll be especially familiar to, let's say, romance fans): Hey, isn't it great that, once you get a Kindle/Nook/iPad, no one can see what you're reading? Now we're forever free from those awkward subway moments when we pull out our trashy novel and realize it's a little too lurid for the L train on a Saturday night.

Well, a bit of bad news for the bookish and private. The Wall Street Journal would like you to know that whoever sold you that ebook--whether it's Amazon, Apple, or whoever--actually is paying attention to what you read. For one thing, maybe be careful what you highlight?

"Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its "most highlighted passages" list."

Oh, but it gets even more datalicious. Over to the Nook:

"Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company's vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to help them create books that better hold people's attention."

To be fair, Barnes and Noble is studying batches of readers rather than individuals. But we're still a little unnerved by the thought of an all-seeing digital eye keeping tabs on our progress through that doorstop of a Steve Jobs bio.

Also please dear sweet merciful Jesus do not start trying to recapture our attention using multimedia in our ebooks:

"Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features, Mr. Hilt says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series."

Sometimes when we put a novel down it's because the damn thing got boring. 

Barnes and Noble's flagship. (flickr.com/edenpictures)

Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced a splashy Microsoft partnership, complete with major cash infusion. Today, Fortune has a Q&A with CEO William Lynch, speculating on how the bookseller can leverage NFC technologies. Whatever its eventual fate, this company seems damned determined that if there's an obituary involved, it will not read like those of Borders.

Asked what the Nook business could've done better, Mr. Lynch suggested the company still has a lot of opportunity in "offline-online integration" and that if they had more time, he would "try to figure out how to unlock cool experiences." His perfect example?

We're going to start embedding NFC chips into our Nooks. We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience.

He wouldn't commit to any particular timing, however.

You know what they say: There's no fervor like the converted.