Hey there, Kindle Fire owners — Amazon’s rolling out a brand new software update for you, and it packs quite a few worthwhile (and arguably overdue) tweaks for your budget-conscious tablet.
Take sharing, for example. Oddly absent from the Kindle Fire at launch was the ability to share interesting snippets of text like its e-ink brethren, but that functionality has been added, along with the ability to tap into Amazon’s people-powered Shelfari service for what the company calls Book Extras — extra related information pertaining to the book a reader is poring through. → Read More
A milestone today in the world of publishing, as Pottermore.com, the site dedicated to all digital things Harry Potter, opened for business as the exclusive distributor of Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. This marks the first time that a major author has ventured forth to offer e-books directly to the public, bypassing publishers’ sites and online bookstores in the process, to allow readers to buy the content direct and then sideload it to their reading platform of choice.
And such is the weight of Harry Potter that Pottermore even got some (but not all) of the biggest book portals, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, to agree to link to Pottermore in affiliate marketing arrangements, rather than routing sales through their own systems (Amazon explains how this works; B&N just links directly through).
No small feat, but is this a sign of how e-books — and perhaps other content like apps — might be more widely sold in the future? → Read More
Early in 2011, upstream suppliers of displays and components let a few of Amazon’s secrets into the open, and these early, incomplete indications were actually on whole quite correct. Now we’re seeing more of the same kind of thing predicting the coming year’s announcements from Amazon, and the predictions seem just as reasonable.
The news is what you might expect: a diversification of the Kindle Fire lineup, with a focus on display quality — and presumably thrift, considering the series’ low price. → Read More
For all the benefits that come with living in Europe — sharing a unified currency, easy access to medical care — getting timely access to Amazon’s popular line of Kindle e-readers isn’t one of them.
Amazon begun rolling out their WiFi-only Kindles in a few new markets this past December and followed up by shipping their Kindle Touch to new markets as well. At long last though, digital bibliophiles in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy will soon get their chance to curl up with the online retailer’s touch-friendly e-reader — starting on April 27, the Kindle Touch will officially launch in each of the countries’ respective Amazon stores. → Read More
Pop the champagne and up the bandwidth, because 2012 is the year we finally do away with discs. According to a Bloomberg report on IHS Screen Digest, more viewers will stream movies than watch them on disc, an inflection point that can only mean the relatively quick demise of high-density optical media. Streaming will increase to 3.4 billion titles this year, up from 1.4 billion. Blu-ray and DVD consumption will top out at 2.4 billion.
The study also found that Amazon on Netflix accounted for 94% of all paid movie consumption online.
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Amazon has just announced that it will acquire order fulfillment company Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash. We’ve embedded the release below.
Kiva Systems’ interconnected hardware and software package is designed to streamline the process of picking, packing and shipping e-commerce products for delivery. The company uses hundreds of autonomous mobile robots and a sophisticated control software, to provide a fulfillment system for retailers. → Read More
Uber has built a business out of being, in the words of its founder and head Travis Kalanick, everyone’s private driver. But while the company is continuing to expand the number of cities where it operates, it is also building out a network to extend beyond vehicles and taxing people around, Kalanick said today.
In a conversation with Alexia on stage at the London Web Summit today, he also laid out the first hints of when Uber plans to launch in London: it will be before this summer, when London is due to host the next Olympics.
“We are definitely going to be here before the Olympics,” he said but also pointed to how important it will be a challenge and not necessarily one that it has faced before. “That will be a cluster for transportation, so we will have to have our game faces on.” → Read More
France has developed something of a reputation in trying to tax larger companies on the Internet to use the funds to help out smaller players. The latest development in that scheme: a proposal to tax large booksellers to help French independent bookstores impacted by the rise of online giants like Amazon.
This is a development on a model that has seen proposals to tax online ads from the likes of Google and the revenues made from ISPs, in order to help out media companies that have been negatively impacted by the rise of digital content. → Read More
For all the cool things an iPad can coaxed into doing, I find myself using mine to read more than anything else (rewatching old episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix is a close second). I’ve been begun to use it more than my trusty Kindle, and thanks to the timely 3.0 update for the iOS Kindle app, organizing and managing all of those books I’ve bought feels a lot snappier.
Take navigating your archived books, for example. A quick tap on the Cloud button at the bottom of the screen jumps into a listing of purchased-but-not-yet-downloaded content. Scrolling though all of them seems appreciably quicker, and all it takes to get back to the books saved on the device is a tap on the (what else?) device button next to it. → Read More
This morning, Amazon announced its mobile app marketplace, the Amazon Appstore for Android, is celebrating its first birthday with a week-long sale on some of its most popular apps.
The company also took the time to share some figures about the Appstore’s growth over the past year, including the size of its selection, which grew from 4,000 apps at launch to 31,000+ apps today. In addition, Amazon released lists of its best-selling apps of all time, both paid and free.
The week-long sale will offer deals on some of Amazon’s top-selling apps, including Fruit Ninja, Wolfram Alpha, Splashtop Remote Desktop, Dr. Seuss’s The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, TuneIn Radio Pro, TETRIS, PAC-MAN, The Lost City, MONOPOLY, AccuWeather Platinum and Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals.
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Amazon announced a new licensing deal this morning with Discovery Communications, the media company behind cable TV channels including the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery and Science and Military Channel. Under the terms of the agreement, which CEO Jeff Bezos calls the company’s “biggest addition yet,” Amazon Prime customers will now have the rights to stream series and specials from those channels, as well as from the company’s 25-year programming library, through Amazon’s video streaming service.
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There’s been lots of debate about whether mobile apps or the web have the upper hand when it comes to making content for smartphones, and when it comes to using it. Some interesting insights from Nielsen out today on how in the case of mobile shopping, for now the main audience in the U.S. seems to be much more interested in using the mobile web over store-specific apps.
The research, which took into account data from some 5,000 Android and iOS smartphones in the U.S., doesn’t spell out how much money is actually spent on mobile web versus apps, and it looks like at least in the period covered by the research — which included the holiday shopping season — the results may have been particularly skewed by the sheer force of Amazon. → Read More
The independent book world has been beset on all sides recently. When the first e-publishers began to go to bat for independent and self-published authors, the writing world rejoiced. For too long the rapacious vanity press had taken their money and offered little in return. There is very little up-front investment for self-published authors except for a good story and a little HTML gumption and Amazon, PayPal, and Barnes & Noble (and Apple) made it easy to publish anything, any time. The market was the critic and the writer reveled in the spoils. Then things changed.
Most recently Seth Godin bumped up against Apple’s publishing guidelines when he added links to Amazon books that Apple does not sell inside his self-published e-book. There can be arguments on either side for Godin’s position that the contents of his books are his and his alone to control. However, another brewing scandal points to outright censorship. Ingrid wrote about it here but given the problems now arising with various epublishers, I thought it would be good to recap.
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Apple may be a big dog in music and movie sales and rentals, but it’s definitely not a big dog in ebooks. That’s what makes this note from Seth Godin particularly galling. In a post on PaidContent, Godin writes that Apple has refused to sell his new book Stop Stealing Dreams because it contains links to Amazon in the bibliography.
The reason cited is that there were “Multiple links to Amazon store.” This could be an overzealous Apple gatekeeper messing up, but they definitely messed up with the wrong guy. → Read More
Carlos Bueno wrote a book called Lauren Ipsum. It’s a book about understanding computers for kids. He priced it at about $14 and offered it as a print-on-demand title and ebook. All was going well, books were selling, when suddenly he noticed a few copies were being offered for $55 or more. But there were no copies to be sold at that price and presumably someone selling a used copy would reduce the price, not increase it.
What was happening was that a bot had found the book and priced it at some ridiculous level – $45 at last count. Bueno was bemused, at best, and realized that bots had found the book and were essentially running a price war amongst themselves in order to offer the same print-on-demand book Bueno was offering at a massively inflated price. They were, in short, going to buy the $14 book and resell it for forty dollars more. → Read More
Another day, another take on Amazon and Apple duking it out in the tablet market. The data comes from NPD’s DisplaySearch wing, and the results don’t come as much of a shock. By their count, Apple is still sitting at the top of the heap, accounting for 59.1 percent of the tablets shipped in Q4 2011 while Amazon is sitting pretty in second place with 16.7 percent of tablet shipments under their belt.
At first glance, the results seem very similar to those announced by iSuppli this time last week — the only major shift is that iSuppli has book retailer Barnes & Noble slightly ahead of Asus. → Read More
In the latest monthly report from app analytics firm Distimo, the company delved into the revenue generating possibilites for apps sold through both Google’s Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. Looking at the top 110 apps available in both marketplaces, Distimo found some surprising data: 42 of those top apps made more money on Amazon’s store than in the more widely available Android Market.
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Barnes & Noble seemed pleasantly surprised when they announced their Nook Tablet “exceeded expectations” over the holidays, but their 70% year-over-year jump in device sales paled in comparison to rival Amazon’s 177%.
That their flagship Nook Tablet cost a full $50 more than the Kindle Fire certainly didn’t help, but that should change soon — according to a document obtained by The Verge, Barnes & Noble will release a new 8GB version of the Nook Tablet on February 22. → Read More
If for some reason you were to mosey on over to Amazon’s Chinese website and perform a search for the iPad, you know what you’d find? No iPad.
Now, you might think to yourself, “Wow, Proview pulled it off,” but that’s not the case at all. In fact, an Amazon spokesperson said that the Apple was the one who requested that the iPad be taken off the site. Proview hasn’t even requested an online sales ban.
Yep, this is tricky, so let’s parse through it together. → Read More
When Groupon was gearing up for its IPO last year, there was a lot of talk about whether the company would be able to sustain its business on a diet that mainly consisted of daily deals. Today, a little sign of what Groupon might be cooking up for its next course.
Over in Germany, Groupon has launched a new site, Groupon Deals, an Amazon-like storefront that sells a range of goods, from boots to bodysuits.
Like its mainstay-daily deals, the products are being sold at big discounts, of up to 70 percent on some items. Unlike the daily deals, these products do not appear to have timeouts on buying them. → Read More
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