Once again, the list of places where you can buy one of Amazon’s Kindles has gotten shorter. According to a new report from Reuters, low-cost retail titan Walmart has completely dropped Amazon’s full line of Kindle e-readers from its online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Don’t hold your breath for your local Wally World to stock new models like Kindle Fire HD or the Kindle Paperwhite either — it… → Read More
The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s digital strategy incarnate. When it launched a year ago, the Fire seemed almost rushed. It looked like RIM’s failed Playbook tablet and it worked, at best, like the low cost tablet it was. But, in the end, it was the best device ever made to access Amazon’s own content. It delivered a seamless read experience, a compelling video collection, and enough apps to keep… → Read More
With the introduction of the $499 8.9-inch Kindle HD with LTE, Amazon now has a device with the same price tag as the new iPad. Of course, the devices are very different when it comes to capacity, connectivity and screen size. But the consumers will have no choice but to compare them.
Yet, contrarily to what many have said, Amazon is not trying to be yet another Apple wannabe. The Kindle… → Read More
If you’ve been put off by the (arguably obtrusive) Special Offers on the Kindle Fire HD, Amazon has just announced that they will allow users to pay $15 to opt-out of the ads for the life of the device.
An Amazon spokesperson wrote:
We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We’re happy to offer customers the choice. → Read More
Oh did you hear? Amazon announced a bunch of new Kindles yesterday. And here’s another little tidbit - those devices, the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, are also getting an updated version of the Amazon Silk browser. The “cloud accelerated” mobile browser has received a handful of its own improvements, says Amazon, including faster page load speeds, better HTML5 support, an improved Start page, and… → Read More
Amazon in its ongoing press conference has hinted at some improvements to the Kindle Fire software. It seems to be a completely new interface with great improvements to existing apps — or, in some cases, totally new apps. Over the past few days, developers have spotted that the Kindle Fire OS is now based on Android 4.0 instead of 2.2. It remains to be confirmed but the important changes seem to… → Read More
Amazon is a company that just cannot stop leaking information about its new products. Before the live coverage of Amazon’s press conference on TechCrunch at 10:30 in Santa Monica, it is now a good time to write down what we know about Amazon’s lineup.
New Kindle devices are highly expected and the major focus of the conference should be on hardware. The Nexus 7 has proven to be a… → Read More
And Amazon’s pre-announcement PR onslaught continues. While the recent Kindle Fire leak may have ruined Amazon’s big surprise, the online retail giant is still working to position itself as a hotspot for Android developers, and has just released some new stats about the growth of its Android Appstore to back up its claims. → Read More
After this morning’s news that the Kindle Fire is now sold out, The Verge received a leaked photo of what is purported to be the next Kindle Fire. Two models are supposed to be released, a 7-inch variant that will replace the existing device and a new 10-inch device that would put it in competition with Apple and the iPad. The Verge’s report lines up nicely with previous rumors that circulated… → Read More
Apparently, Amazon has been crunching its own internal data this week in order to tout the traction surrounding its various products. Only yesterday, the company was talking about numbers related to its Prime two-day delivery, and today it’s boasting about Kindle title downloads. The company now says that its Kindle-exclusive books have been downloaded over 100 million times, and the number of… → Read More
For most geeks, uttering the word “Firedock” conjures up images of this Kindle Fire-friendly speaker dock that was announced back in March.
But something interesting happened last month — Grace Digital released that very same Kindle Fire speaker dock under a different name on July 17. That by itself isn’t much to write home about, but The Digital Reader points out that Amazon now owns the… → Read More
We’ve heard a lot of rumors in the last year, but now Barnes & Noble has finally unveiled its first official plans for taking its Nook tablets and e-readers to markets outside of the U.S. Today it announced that it will be launching the devices, starting first with the e-readers, in the UK in October, along with a new UK online storefront for the Nook digital bookstore (2.5 million digital… → Read More
The Digital Reader has done some clever sleuthing to find a filing by Amazon’s shell company, Harpers LLC. The filing shows a fairly large, 10-inch 4:3 screen device that should launch in the fall.
You can see the filing here. → Read More
Well, Barnes and Noble seems to be in a giving mood today. The company revealed earlier this morning that eager customers can nab themselves a 16GB Nook Tablet for $199 — $50 off its original price. Meanwhile, the 8GB Nook Tablet now goes for $179 (down from $199), and aging Nook Color can how be had for the relatively low price of $149.
As for why Barnes and Noble has suddenly decided to… → Read More
According to an Amazon UK release, the company is now selling more ebooks than hardback or paperback books in Britain, a tipping point that we reached in the U.S. over a year ago. It took four years for U.S. ebook sales to overtake print sales.
The company is selling 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books. Amazon introduced the kindle in the UK two years ago. → Read More
There’s a little-known stipulation in Amazon’s 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device’s weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven’t been many reports of actual notifications.
That’s recently changed. One user of the … → Read More
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I’m pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury – who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project – recently bought HMV’s share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that’s about $1.50.)… → Read More
Web traffic from the Apple iPad saw a slight drop in early June, according to new data from the Chitika Ad network, which analyzed a sample containing hundreds of millions of impressions to arrive at its conclusions. In May, the iPad had accounted for 94.64% of all tablet web traffic, the company previously reported. Today, the company says the iPad has dropped to a 91.07% share. However, the… → Read More
Until now, periodicals like comic books were only available to Kindle Fire owners but that all changes today. Amazon has made sweeping changes across the lineup to bring children’s books, graphic novels and comics to Kindle for iOS, Android and its Cloud Reader. → Read More
Amazon’s $79 Kindle may be the least flashy of the the bunch, but the Seattle company is starting to push out a new software update that adds some much-needed functionality to their cost-conscious e-reader.
One of the biggest additions to the mix is support for Kindle Format 8, Amazon’s relatively new ebook file format. The $79 Kindle seems to be bringing up the rear in that respect, as the… → Read More
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:
The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now features over 145,000 books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers. With traditional library lending, the library buys a certain number of… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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