Potter fans will now be able to download all seven Harry Potter books from Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library, a service offered free for Amazon Prime users.
From the PR:
With the announcement that the Kindle Fire has grabbed 54.4% of the Android Tablet market, it’s clear to see that Amazon’s Trojan Horse strategy paid off. As I wrote back in December, the Fire is Amazon’s way of making all of their offerings “real.” Movies, books, and games were Amazon’s core competency back when all of that stuff was on disks and on paper and that core competency is repurposed now for the Information Age.
That’s what all of the other Android tablet makers missed: people don’t want general-purpose devices anymore or at least general-purpose devices in tablet form. There is little need to be “productive” on a tablet when consumption is why most people buy them. Sure someone out there is SSHing into their servers and editing documents in Pages, but the average user plops down on the couch with the iPad and calls up some IMDB or some NSFW Reddit, not a text editor.
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Are Amazon’s Kindle tablets and e-readers ready to break into the world’s biggest market? We’ve spotted some Chinese Help documentation for Amazon Kindle devices on the company’s China-facing site in a sign that they may be coming for real this time.
Even though the online documentation vanished, we have a screenshot of Google’s cached version of the site (see below). Amazon’s China office declined to comment. → Read More
The heart of Jeff Bezos’ mission has always to circumvent the traditional “gatekeepers” of commerce. He started with books, an industry ripe for disruption, and moved onto, well, everything else. At this point, his vision has come true. The old gatekeepers in the book sales cycle are on the ropes and electronics companies are already planning to collude in order to maintain a “minimum” accepted price, thereby ensuring Amazon doesn’t eat all of their lunch.
But Amazon is hungry and, like Plainview, they have a long straw. They won’t just eat the world’s lunch, they’ll drink its milkshake, too.
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Living in Seattle, you tend to find yourself in the company of tech people all the time. With Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google, and a dozen other major companies established in the area, it’s never a surprise when you find out the guy next to you at the bar is working on Windows Phone 8 or Half-Life 3. This week, I was lucky enough to get a chance to see what Amazon has cooking for its next generation of e-readers. Their new offices and the mysterious Lab 126 are just down the street, after all, so I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened before now.
Back in November, I speculated that the new Kindles and Nooks and what have yous might have glowing screens, the likes of which we’ve seen occasionally but were never fully implemented. It turns out Amazon was thinking the same thing, and actually bought a company that was, I am told, the world leader in light-guide technology. They’ve finally gotten it to the point where it’s ready to be released, and a new generation of glowing Kindles will be coming our way sometime this year. → Read More
Amazon has been making some big strides in extending its footprint outside of the U.S. with its Kindle e-readers and Kindle bookstore, but today it took a step to improve how it caters to Spanish speakers closer to home, with the launch of a new section of its U.S. Kindle store dedicated to books in Spanish.
Called “eBooks Kindle en Español,” Amazon says the store features 30,000 e-books in Spanish along with a whole new level of customer support aimed at Spanish-speaking users, including help pages as well as phone and email customer support in the language. The move represents how Amazon is looking to take its Kindle offerings beyond the first tier of early adopters that have bought the product to date.
It also underscores how companies like Amazon are trying to capitalize on the rise of e-readers and e-books. Research out today from Pew shows that at the moment only about 21 percent of adults in the U.S. have read an e-book in the last year. That number appears to be on the rise, going up by three percent just between December 2011 and February 2012. → Read More
The FireDock is a specially designed speaker dock just for the Kindle Fire. Other devices may work, but they probably won’t be happy. It’s built by Grace Digital Audio and should cost $130 when it is released in July.
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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
Amazon’s Kindle team seems have had their hands full these past few days — a Retina Display-friendly update was just pushed to the iOS App Store last week, and now the Android version is getting a nice little bump too.
One of the biggest additions to this build is support for Amazon’s relatively new KF8 ebook file format. Originally revealed back in October 2011 (and officially released this January), KF8 allows publishers and content creators greater flexibility when it comes to text formatting and image integration into ebooks.
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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
If you own a tablet and have children, chances are that this will not come as news to you. For those who don’t but work in mobile, it’s something worth remembering when you’re concocting up your next big product: Kids are crazy about tablets.
According to some research out today from Nielsen in the U.S., in households that own a tablet, seven out of 10 children under the age of 12 use them. And that usage is on the rise: those numbers are for Q4 2011, and are a nine percent increase on the quarter before. → Read More
Seattle-area startup Puzzazz began as a creator of online, mobile, and e-book puzzles. But they’ve established a new core technology that might end up being a bigger draw than their Sudoku apps. They call it TouchWrite, and it lets you draw letters and numbers directly on the screen instead of tapping them on the on-screen keyboard.
A modest achievement in some ways — basic handwriting recognition goes back decades — but the fact is that the ability to draw a B or 7 right on the screen is handy, and more natural to puzzle-doers than the alternative. But more importantly, it’s a fundamental method of interaction that none of the touchscreen e-readers have implemented, and Puzzazz is in a position to make their solution the official one. → Read More
Amazon used to be able to sell the Kindle based on its readability in sunlight. That’s a fair comparison to make and the old advertising featured little more than people being happy reading. To wit: → Read More
According to GoodEReader, Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I’d be circling the wagons right now.
To be fair, Amazon’s own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven’t been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Clay Shirkey and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that’s not why publishing has to worry.
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When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?
“Think Profit.”
You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.
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For people who have been doing just one thing for a long, long time, it’s amazing how many content distributors get things so catastrophically wrong.
These last few weeks brought us quite a few unique situations, including the launch of Apple’s iBook Author software as well as a number of announcements from the studios to withhold streaming rights for Netflix viewers. Cory Doctorow points to a particularly delightful bit of DRM making the rounds in publishing right now, something that will be familiar iTunes users who found their real names embedded in music files a while back. → Read More
Right now, most e-books look an awful lot like their print counterparts, but startups like just-launched Coliloquy want to change that. In the past few months, other companies like Findings, Readmill, and Subtext have experimented with adding annotations and other social features to e-books. Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford said she wants to go further. → Read More
Amazon has stopped pretending that a group of e-reading apps it allowed onto its Android Appstore weren’t available on the Kindle Fire. For whatever reason, the company was effectively hiding e-reading apps from companies like Wattpad, Kobo and Bluefire, even though they worked perfectly fine on the low-cost tablet computer.
Confused about why its app didn’t appear for users on the Kindle Fire, which is proving to be quite a sought-after device, Wattpad engaged in conversations with some folks over at Amazon, which apparently led to a necessary change in policy for all makers of mobile e-reading apps.
It’s unclear when Amazon started showing e-reading apps from rivals (including Wattpad’s) on Kindle Fire, exactly, but it seems they started appearing in listings sometime yesterday afternoon. Possibly, this was part of the Kindle Fire update that was delivered earlier this week. → Read More
Amazon has updated the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad, adding some basic improvements to the standard assortment of reader functions. These include the addition of “print replica” textbooks so students can follow along with the paper copy in class as well as improved PDF support and a personal document system that lets you send files to an Amazon address for conversion.
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