Articles about Amazon

Amazon's Kindle has managed to make a tremendous impact on the e-reader market without even being available in physical stores. Soon, however, Amazon's best-selling product will be available through retailers in stores across the U.S.

Today, Best Buy announced it will be selling the Wi-Fi only 6" Kindle for $139.99 and its 3G-equipped counterpart for $189 in all of its stores this fall. The company says the 9.7" Kindle DX will be available "later in the season."

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The first two "active content" apps for the Amazon Kindle e-reader have been released for download, consisting of the word games "Every Word," and "Shuffled Row."

In the first weeks of 2010, Web retailer Amazon released the Kindle Development Kit to partners to begin work on interactive applications for the popular e-reader. Formerly, the Kindle platform supported only a very limited amount of interactivity, which included note-taking, highlighting, and later, the ability to send clips and quotations to social networks Twitter and Facebook. Early attempts at games for the platform had to be corralled into the device's experimental browser, which made for a poor overall experience.

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Amazon, online retailer and e-book pioneer announced Thursday the latest generation of its popular 6" Kindle e-book reader.

The Kindle received an overhaul similar to the one its big brother Kindle DX got on the first of July, with a new graphite chassis, improved screen resolution, and lower price.

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Online retail giant Amazon on Tuesday launched a beta of new functionality intended to use data from Facebook to make recommendations. Once connected, the retailer would comb through the data in both your own profile and that of your friends.

Amazon said it would share no personal data with Facebook. The social networking site would be sending data over to Amazon, however: this would include the user's likes and favorites on Facebook as well as his or her friends, and their birthdays. In addition, Amazon would make it easier for a user to find a friend's wish list once the services are connected, but this would be a guess based on given information.

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Discovery Communications intellectual property subsidiary Discovery Patent Holdings filed suit against Amazon Wednesday, claiming Amazon's line of Kindle e-book readers infringe on two patents held by the company. The suit is the second between the two companies over such technologies.

Amazon was originally sued by Discovery Communications in March of last year, accusing the company of violation of a comprehensive patent on e-book readers titled "Electronic Book Security and Copyright Protection System" (#7,298,851). This covered the Kindle and Kindle 2 models.

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Keeping the Kindle momentum high, Amazon has announced the next generation of Kindle DX is available for pre-order today, and will be shipping on July 7th.

The new Kindle DX has the same 9.7" screen size, and the same free 3G wireless, but features a new graphite chassis and a higher contrast e-ink screen with a purported 50% improvement in contrast. Furthermore, all of this is available at a price about 25% less than the first generation DX.

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Woot said Wednesday that it had been acquired by Amazon, although it provided few details on what exactly will become of the online deal site other than it would become an independent subsidiary much like the online retailer's other acquisitions, Zappos and Audible.

Sources told technology blog TechCrunch that the sale price was in the neighborhood of $110 million in cash. In an e-mail to his employees, CEO Matt Rutledge seemed to suggest that not much would change as a result of the new owners.

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This month, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders have been engaged in some serious e-reader competition. Following the introduction of Borders' bargain-priced Kobo e-paper reader, both Barnes and Noble and Amazon cut the prices of their Nook and Kindle products to put all three products on a level playing field. All three book retailers have been pushing their cross-platform software readers too, jockeying for superiority in the e-book trade.

But retail price wars and marketing blitzes are only one side of the business. Today, Amazon made a significant appeal to another side: independent content publishers.

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No sooner does Barnes and Noble lower the price of its nook e-reader, than Amazon does the same with the Kindle.

Amazon.com has just announced that the 3G-equipped Kindle 2 e-reader is now $189 (down from $259,) making it $10 cheaper than Barnes and Noble's newly reduced 3G nook.

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Kindle is, without a doubt, the highest profile e-reader platform running. With applications on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows, and OS X as well as its own line of e-paper Kindle devices, Amazon had an estimated 90% share of the e-book sales market last year.

Today, Amazon announced that a Kindle app will be launched on the Android mobile operating system this summer.

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We've always known that the Internet has evolved since 1996 (whose laws were based to some degree on the world circa 1978) to something that current US telecommunications law doesn't adequately describe. The whole court debate over whether the Federal Communications Commission could legally address how Comcast manages its network traffic wasn't really about whether it should, but rather whether current law designates that it can.

Up until yesterday, the two choices before the FCC were whether the broadband system it wants to regulate is more like a telephone (Title II) or a teletype (Title I). For years, its leaders argued that Title I of the Telecommunications Act, amended in 1996, was more fitting, making the case that since broadband services were usually piggy-backed over communications services anyway, its ancillary authority to protect information services could be attributed to its primary authority to protect communications services. In a decision very, very likely to survive judicial review, the DC Circuit said that's wrong.

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When Amazon debuted its first Kindle e-reader just over two years ago, we asked "...but will anyone buy it?"

We still can't say for certain.

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It has been just about one year since Amazon launched its Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch; and today, thanks to popular demand, it has come to BlackBerry.

Like the iPhone app, Kindle for BlackBerry is free, and doesn't require a dedicated Kindle e-reader to use. Within the app, users can browse the Kindle Store and download e-books directly, and if you have already purchased Kindle e-books, you have access to your entire library, synced to the last place you left off in each book.

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Online retailer Amazon.com had quite a year. Yesterday, the company reported a 42% year-over-year increase in fourth quarter net sales, and a 71% increase in net income. For the full year 2009, Amazon's net sales increased 28% to $24.51 billion, and its net income increased 40% to $902 million.

This increase in profits and revenue is attributable to a number of factors, among them were the drop in price for its EC2 and S3 cloud services in October, for the November acquisition of Zappos.com, and of course, the launch of the Kindle 2 in the beginning of 2009.

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If you're selling a broadband-connected device these days, it's almost required to have a platform for application development that goes along with it. The mobile phone space is overrun with different development options, heck, even networked printers have got one now.

Amazon is about to see if the Kindle e-book reader is a viable platform for third-party apps.

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