Items tagged with Amazon.com
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Michael Santo - Thu, Jan 28, 2010
Those who may be in the midst of their Amazon.com stock after the introduction of the iPad, may want to pause and think for a second. While many forecast the Kindle's demise, more important than a Kindle sale for Amazon.com are sales of its e-books.After all, as with printers, it's all about...
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Michael Santo - Thu, Dec 24, 2009
Anything that can be hacked will be hacked, and virtually everything can be hacked. Thus, we see that latest escapade in the land of hacking. The Kindle's DRM (digital rights management, copy protection) has been compromised.Amazon sells content for the Kindle in a proprietary format, .azw. It contains DRM to prevent users from transferring...
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Michael Santo - Wed, Dec 16, 2009
This will probably raise red flags across the publishing industry, but it is certainly a coup for Amazon.com and its Kindle e-book reader. Steven Covey is Amazon.com's 13th-highest top-selling author overall, and Amazon.com now has "electronic exclusivity" to two of his best-sellers.The e-book...
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Michael Santo - Wed, Nov 11, 2009
Intel on Tuesday introduced a new e-book reader, one designed for the visually impaired, which can read digital files of books aloud, as well as capture images from printed material via a 5-megapixel digital camera and similarly read the text aloud at a variety of listening speeds. Additionally, the Intel Reader, as its called, has a 4" display...
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Michael Santo - Tue, Nov 03, 2009
Barnes & Noble's nook hasn't even seen the light of day yet (it's pre-order only), and it's already embroiled in a lawsuit. In this case, Spring Design, which has its own e-book reader, is claiming B&N has used IP garnered from meetings with Spring Design in its nook.The lawsuit...
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Michael Santo - Sun, Sep 20, 2009
Amazon.com has announced its own house brand of electronics. The new brand, called "AmazonBasics," is, according to the giant Internet retailer, a new private-label collection of consumer electronic "basics" created for customers who want "exceptional value." In other words, basic low-priced electronics goods, which for now appears to be limited...
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Michael Santo - Fri, Sep 04, 2009
Amazon.com, which took the Orwellian step of remotely deleting copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" from customers' Kindles, has apologized. On Thursday, they announced a sort of "reparations program" for those customers. In an email sent to...
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Michael Santo - Fri, Aug 28, 2009
It's not the first time an e-tailer has outed a product early. It won't be the last. It appears that Amazon.com's German site has listed a 250GB version of the Xbox 360 Elite. It's a good time to be a gamer, eh? First the PS3 "Slim" and a $100 price reduction, then the corresponding $100 price...
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Michael Santo - Fri, Jul 31, 2009
Shoot, when we were kids, the best we could get away with in terms of something similar to this was "the dog ate my homework." In this case, a lawsuit has been filed after the well-publicized e-book deletion fiasco that ending up remotely deleting legitimately purchased e-books from users'...
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Michael Santo - Sat, Jul 18, 2009
Another day, another PR mess for Amazon.com. Just as they seem to have settled the row over cracked Kindles (although the lawsuit continues!), users awoke Friday morning to find e-books remotely deleted from their Kindles, and the PR storm started up all over again.The Big...
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Michael Santo - Fri, Jul 17, 2009
People usually buy cases to protect their technology. In this case, the $30 case Amazon.com has been selling as a Kindle 2 accessory has apparently been causing cracks in the Kindle where the case clips to it, that eventually cracks the screen. Not good, and also not good that it took a lawsuit to prompt Amazon.com to offer replacements without...
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Michael Santo - Mon, Jun 01, 2009
According to a report in the New York Times, Google has its sights trained squarely on the e-book market. This move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which has a big head start in the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle device (pictured below). The report stated that Google had discussions with publishers at the annual...
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Michael Santo - Thu, Apr 16, 2009
We've previously written about the so-called "Amazon Tax," New York State's move to expand the definition of a physical presence in a state so as to be able to force a retailer to charge sales tax. WEe also wrote that this was just the beginning, and as we expected, things are accelerating. As...
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Michael Santo - Sat, Apr 11, 2009
The Reading Rights Coalition, an advocacy group that represents the blind as well as disabled readers, held a protest outside the offices of The Authors Guild on Tuesday. The organization hopes to get the Guild to reverse its stance on the Kindle 2's "Read-to-Me" functionality. The Authors Guild earlier placed a lot of pressure on Amazon.com...
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Michael Santo - Wed, Apr 08, 2009
It's not exactly the type of price match people think of when they hear the words "price match," and it sure wasn't something we had expected so soon, but it's here. Amazon MP3 has price-matched iTunes, so to speak. On the same day that Apple rolled out variable, tiered pricing on...
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Michael Santo - Sun, Feb 15, 2009
Amazon.com has halted sales of a Japanese video game that simulated the rape of a mother and her two daughters. The Rapelay game had been offered, not directly by Amazon.com, but rather through its third-party Amazon Marketplace service. The seller specializes in "hentai" — sexually explicit...
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Michael Santo - Sat, Feb 07, 2009
We're already aware that on Monday Amazon.com will most likely be announcing Kindle 2. But will they also be announcing software for smartphones that will allow users to download, buy, and read Kindle books? The New York Times says that Amazon.com has confirmed that they are working on such...
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Michael Santo - Wed, Jan 14, 2009
The days of sales tax-free purchases on the Internet edged closer to an end on Monday, as a New York court dismissed the lawsuits which had been filed by Overstock.com and Amazon.com over the so-called "Amazon Tax." New York enacted this tax on Internet retailers that have affiliates based in...
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Amy Vernon - Sat, Dec 27, 2008
Digital photo frames are a hot gift item these days, but anyone buying a Samsung SPF-85H 8-inch digital photo frame through Amazon.com this year may have given their loved ones a little something extra: A computer virus.Amazon reached out to its purchasers with a note just before the holiday.Here's a snippet of their warning to customers:...
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Michael Santo - Sat, Dec 20, 2008
Yes, Sony has declared a war on the clamshell, packaging that is. We wrote earlier about Amazon.com's "frustration-free packaging" initiative, and this is an example of a similar initiative, aimed at getting rid of those clamshell packages that seem almost lethal. We call them lethal because (and I know you've experienced this if you've opened...
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Michael Santo - Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Despite dire predictions for this year's holiday season, Black Friday results for online retailers showed a 1% increase from last year's Black Friday sales, to $534 million, according to a report by market research firm comScore. All is not rosy in the stats, however; comScore noted that for...
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Michael Santo - Sun, Feb 17, 2008
When Amazon.com opened its software download service in early January, it seemed curious that they would create a downloader app if they didn't have something larger in mind. A job posting on Gamasutra suggests Amazon will soon start a PC game download store to compliment Unbox, its...
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