Digital distribution has infiltrated media. We saw MP3s take over the music business, and we're seeing streaming take over the film and TV business, but will it happen to the book business too?

Who better to ask than an executive at a site dealing in the trade of good old fashioned paper books? Betanews spoke with Eric Ginsberg, the VP of marketing at startup Bookswim.com, a company whose business model is identical to the one pioneered by Netflix. At Bookswim, subscribers build a queue of books, receive them in the mail, and send them back when they're finished reading.

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Amazon hosted an event today at the Morgan Library in New York that officially unveiled the second generation Kindle which surfaced in leaked photos as far back as October 2008.

The new Kindle has the same screen size as the original version, but has received an upgrade to the shape and durability of the chassis. Now only a fraction of the thickness (0.36" at its thickest), and stuffed with a purported seven times the amount of storage of the first generation Kindle, the latest version has incorporated a metal back plate into the body design.

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The $99 Roku set top box that ushered in the age of streaming Netflix became an open platform late last year and will soon be offering Amazon on Demand to all. The streaming service this week entered private beta for select Roku users.

Amazon's Video on Demand, a sort of re-thinking of Unbox, left its beta stage in September. At launch, the service offered over 40,000 movies and television episodes with fees ranging from free to $3.99 per rental. Amazon support on the Roku device balances the Netflix content with new releases, an area where the subscription service remains weak.

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Less than four months after buying games distribution and development specialist Reflexive Entertainment, Amazon rolled into beta with its own casual games download site on Tuesday, celebrating the occasion with a one-week trial offer.

The games available for free download from February 3 - 10 include Jewel Quest 2, The Scruffs, and Built A Lot.

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Short and mostly sweet: Amazon execs blasted through their earnings call on Thursday in just under 45 minutes. But the results themselves were worth lingering over: a best-ever holiday season, kindling joy in analysts' hearts.

Wall Street expected good things from the Seattle e-commerce firm, to the tune of returns of 39 cents per share. The company came back with 52 cents/share, on a profit of $225 million. Net sales revenue during the crucial holiday season was up 18% year-over-year to $6.7 billion; $3.64 billion of that was Amazon's traditional "square-box" fare of books, DVDs, and CDs, which were up 9%. The jump in less traditional Amazon products such as clothing and electronics was even more impressive, up 31% to $2.89 billion.

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Amazon today announced that owners of the formerly Netflix-exclusive Roku set-top box will be able to access Amazon Video On Demand, and LG announced it's building Netflix instant streaming directly into some of its upcoming HDTVs.

Video rental company Netflix is proving to be a genuine gateway to streaming video content. Today, Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service will be hitting Roku players early this year, adding nearly 40,000 more titles to the around 30,000 Netflix delivers to the diminutive box. Titles are pure H.264 streams (no downloading, since the Roku device has no storage) and will play back at 300, 600, 900, or 1200 kbps. Amazon says movies and TV shows will be rentable or buyable.

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In a move that will extend the Web's biggest cloud to encompass much of the globe, the company that began as an online bookstore is opening its commercial server hosting platform to the EU.

The basic Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now open to customers in the European Union. While this will bring Amazon's managed hosting alternative closer to potentially thousands more customers, they'll be paying slightly higher fees than in the US.

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The "tip jar" system that provided a donation option for thousands of small sites in the early 2000s and raised millions for survivors of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters will turn off the lights on Thursday.

The Amazon Honor System launched after the implosion of the first dot-com era, offering small sites a means by which visitors could offer their support for the costs of furnishing well-liked content.

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Yieldex, a service that forecasts online ad inventories and aids publishers in making the system work smoothly, took the top prize in Amazon's second annual Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

That prize is more than just a loving cup; Yieldex will get $50,000 cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Services credits, and maybe -- maybe! -- an investment offer from The House That Bezos Built.

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Today, Amazon entered beta with CloudFront, an expanded cloud service aimed at taking the company into the same league as Akamai and Limelight. As with other cloud services, customers will be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The first beta of CloudFront from Amazon promises a service designed to add content distribution network (CDN) capabilities to the company's existing cloud in order to enable faster download times for users storing large files such as graphics and video. Through CloudFront, users will replicate content files from elsewhere in the cloud to the "edge servers" closest to their own physical locations.

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Nonprofit equity computing project One Laptop Per Child this morning opened its Give One, Get One (G1G1) store on Amazon.com.

For $399, customers buy one OLPC XO Laptop to donate to a developing nation, and get one for themselves or to give as a gift. The G1G1 program last year initially was slated to last only one week, but was extended due to the extremely high demand placed on the company's ordering infrastructure.

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Beginning today, customers can implement instances of Windows Server 2003 (licensed to and purchased by them) in Amazon's cloud, enabling businesses to deploy sophisticated Internet applications without their own servers.

After a two-year beta cycle, Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service this morning entered general availability. Now, for what's essentially a service, what does this mean besides removing the warning that some parts are still under construction? Today, Amazon implemented a service-level agreement for EC2 customers guaranteeing 99.95% availability during what it describes as a "service year."

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2:56 pm PDT October 22, 2008 - Amazon's third-quarter earnings call had plenty of positive things to say about their success with the Kindle e-book reader. Good thing the company's happy with it, because it'll be the one and only Kindle for the remainder of the year.

CFO Tom Szkutak confirmed during this afternoon's call that there will be no newer model of the Kindle reader until 2009.

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After tests are completed sometime this fall, the cloud provider announced this morning, customers will be able to deploy complete Windows Server-based machine images to Amazon's high-capacity computing cloud, eliminating hardware costs.

In what could be a waterspout moment, if you will, for cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer Jeff Barr announced this morning that his operation is currently hosting a private beta of hosted Microsoft Windows Server instances. Within the next three months, AWS customers will be able to deploy machine images with 32- or 64-bit versions of Windows Server -- including high-performance packages -- to Amazon's cloud, to be hosted remotely.

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Today, Amazon announced its indie publishing service CreativeSpace is now tied with its MP3 shop, allowing independent artists and labels to release DRM-free materials in Amazon's MP3 store.

Artists can set up an account on CreateSpace and sell their materials with no upfront charges; however, accounts are arranged in such a way that money is not directly distributed to artists. Instead, royalty checks are given out with expenses subtracted.

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