Can the hype surrounding buzzy tech like Twitter, the Kindle and cloud computing get any louder? No, pronounces tech consultancy Gartner Inc., which has a very official-looking chart to make its case. But are you better off being on top of the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” or working your way up the “Slope of Enlightenment”? Who knows?
Novelist Nicholson Baker loves books, but not Jeff Bezos’s device: “Amazon is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things…fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch.”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t make it to his company’s earnings call today, but he did find time to apologize for Kindlegate–Amazon’s ham-fisted removal of George Orwell novels from his customers’ e-book readers. Great, right? Almost.
Amazon’s Q2 was just what Wall Street was expecting–which in Wall Street’s perverse logic means that Wall Street will be disappointed. Amazon delivered net sales of $4.65 billion and earnings of 32 cents per share; consensus called for $4.67 billion and 32 cents. Jeff Bezos might have been able to allay investors’ worries, but he was a no-show for the conference call.
Here’s another set of customers for AT&T: People who buy e-book readers from Plastic Logic, the would-be Kindle killer due out next year.
Privately held Plastic Logic says it will rely on AT&T to supply its gadgets with a wireless connection, in the same way that Sprint is the network provider for Amazon’s Kindle.
Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?
Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.
Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.
Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.
Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.
What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.
Amazon’s Kindle gets many plaudits, but it also gets one consistent criticism: Why can’t it come with a color screen? It can, say the folks at Pixel Qi, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Taiwan: It could use the cheap, lightweight color screens that we’re going to make.
Even as the rest of the retail world stumbled in the past year, Amazon kept cruising and increasing market share. So if a cratering economy can’t hurt the e-commerce giant, what could? Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney throws out a suggestion: Movies, books and music–the same stuff that helped Amazon get the lead it enjoys today.
Are you one of those Kindle owners who stuffs your device with cheap e-books? Enjoy it now, say analysts at Bernstein Research. Because they’re not going to stay cheap, or at least, not quite as cheap, forever. Right now Amazon makes much more money selling you a hardcover book than a digital one. That can’t go on indefinitely.
At some point, this will no longer be a coincidence: Once again, Amazon’s newest e-book reader has sold out shortly after launch. This time, it’s the Kindle DX, the super-sized reader with the super-sized price tag. Amazon started selling the DX three days ago, and by yesterday afternoon the e-commerce giant said it was cleaned out. The next batch won’t arrive until next week.
We all know tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be printed on paper, but delivered via the Internet. The question for today’s publishers is whether consumers are going read them on iPhones or Kindles. But it shouldn’t be a question–smart phones like Apple’s are winning this one hands down.
I actually got to fondle Amazon’s newest Kindle DX at its unveiling earlier this month. So I can confirm that it really isn’t that big. But you can see where these guys are going with this.
Sure, $489 for Amazon’s new Kindle DX textbook reader may seem like a lot. But if you take the long view–and keep your Kindle DX away from thieves and keg parties–it should pay for itself in a couple of years argues Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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