For retailers, the crucial season is on its way. Blow the Christmas rush, and next year starts off on a miserable foot. Success, of course, also delivers a healthy dose of momentum -- and a little bit of wiggle room, important in what will continue to be a tough economy through at least the first half of next year. For booksellers, now contending with a new variable in the form of digital readers, e-readers will play a major role in defining the winners and losers. So far, it looks like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is off to a great start, and it will take some genuine innovation for the competition to chip away at its market share.

Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), once the leading names in literary retail, is expected to release its own e-reader this week. It will look a bit like Amazon's Kindle, according to Reuters, but with a touch screen intended to make the reader's experience easier. The price hasn't been disclosed yet, but rumor has it that it'll be higher than the Kindle's $259. BKS is staying mum on its plans in this space. There are others in the space, as well, including IREX Technologies, which is a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG), Asutek (tk: tk) and a project called FirstPaper that has Hearst behind it.

Printers of the world unite! Feeling the squeeze from the likes of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), a group of magazine publishers is forming an industrywide joint venture ... for protection.

Led by Time Inc., a division of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), participating companies would create a digital storefront for their content. In this way, they could peddle their goods without the hefty carve-outs that come with Amazon and Apple deals.

MOST NOTEWORTHY: dELiA's Inc. (DLIA), Hearst-Argyle TV (HTV) and Safeway (SWY) were today's noteworthy downgrades:

• Friedman Billings downgraded dELiA's Inc (NASDAQ: DLIA) to Market Perform from Outperform citing the difficult near-term environment.

• Deutsche Bank would use Hearst-Argyle TV's (NYSE: HTV) tender offer for the remaining shares of HTV at $23.50 as an opportunity to sell shares and cut the stock to Hold from Buy.

• Merrill cut Safeway (NYSE: SWY) shares to Sell from Neutral citing the slowing California economy and the potential threat from Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) entering the California market with its new Tesco (OTC: TSCDY) format...

OTHER DOWNGRADES:

• Vimicro (NASDAQ: VIMC) was cut to Underweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley.

• BB&T downgraded Green Bankshares (NASDAQ: GRNB) to Hold from Buy.

• Citigroup downgraded Samsung to Hold and Hynix Semiconductor to Sell.

Analyst summaries provided by TheFlyOnTheWall.com (subscription required).

Hearst Magazines Digital Media, as the name implies, is the dot-com division of the old-line publisher. Basically, the unit helps create synergy with assets like CosmoGIRL!, Seventeen, and Teen.

Well, today the company announced the purchase of eCRUSH.com, which is a community site for teens and young adults (the price was not disclosed). Founded in 1999 on Valentine's Day, the site is essentially a dating enabler. In fact, there have been more than 900,000 matches.

Yes, eCRUSH has implemented a variety of features for safety – such as content filtering, screening, and so on. Of course, in terms of scale, it comes nowhere near MySpace (but who does?). Then again, this is probably an inexpensive way for Hearst to get traction.

Actually, Hearst is already spinning interesting ideas to monetize things. The next spin-off site: MyPromShopper.com.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.