It been reported that this move to fire the staff was just a way to remove the employee equity in the company, thus making the owners more of a share of the sale price. Steve Perlman may be a giant Scrooge. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/source-onlive-found-a-buyer-cleaned-house-to-reduce-liability-prior-to-acquisition/

Capacitive. Not IR or Passive. They really are trying a different approach to the device as "social" reading. While the Fire is more a media device, for the US. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiRxIXytLYQ The only thing I'm concerned about is the Android Market. While they say it's a full and open android device. I suspect they have their own Android store and will have limited you to apps they allow. Whether you can sideload the Kindle app on to it needs to be seen.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml Here's a tutorial to stitch scans together the slight curve of the page is minimized where the scan joins. Might be what you are looking for.