Amazon has announced that it plans to cripple one of the features of the new Kindle 2, its text-to-speech feature, to avoid angering publishers wanting to sell audio books: Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are […]

Tim O’Reilly has published an opinion piece today saying that the Kindle must open up or die: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years. In developing the business plan for the Kindle, Amazon was no […]

Amazon.com today introduced Amazon Kindle 2, the new reading device that offers, in their words, Kindle’s “revolutionary wireless delivery of content” in a slimmer, sleeker package. The book reader retails for $359 and is scheduled to ship beginning February 24. Amazon is taking pre-orders here. Amazon enthuses that the new Kindle model has a longer […]

Online retailer Amazon.com announced today that its 40,000-item library of movies and television programs will now be available via the Roku digital video player. Previously, the $99 device only supported streaming video rentals from Netflix. According to the Roku website, “Rentals [from Amazon] are available in prices ranging from 99 cents to $3.99, for a […]

Amazon today announced a new service, Amazon CloudFront, that promises to speed up your site.  It’s a simple pay-as-you-go content delivery network that offers to deliver your content to people, with Amazon-scale service, but without big upfront costs.  Amazon has a network of “edge” network locations that it can automatically distribute your content to. These […]

Podcast Solutions, the “complete guide to podcasting” co-authored by award-winning podcaster (and Kindle fan) Michael Geoghegan, is now available on the Amazon Kindle. Geoghegan is the creator of wine podcast Grape Radio (for which he won a James Beard award), and the behind-the-scenes Disney podcast, among others, and creator-facilitator of the Podcast Academy. We first […]

Last year, we called the Kindle “this year’s Zunetanic, an over-hyped iPod-wannabee.” A little harsh, maybe, but the prediction is panning out to be true.  Since then, Amazon has dropped the price for the Kindle, announced a lot more books for the device and sold in modest numbers, leading Amazon to admit that the device was […]

Amazon has announced plans for a content deliver network – a network designed to speed up the delivery of content on your Website – that will be easy to use and pay-as-you-go.  A content delivery network is a distributed network of servers that put copies of your content close to end-users. For example, if someone […]

Amazon today announced Amazon Video On Demand, a new video service that lets customers watch ad-free movies and television shows on Macs or PCs. Previously, customers could only download titles and watch them on a PC (using the Amazon Unbox application) or on their TiVo box. Now customers can either watch instantly within their web […]

A lot of tech analysts, including TechCrunch and Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, have been talking up their estimates of Kindle sales, and positioning Amazon’s device as the iPod of ebooks. Unfortunately for Amazon, the numbers being thrown around by TechCrunch & Citi appear to be bogus. According to a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Amazon […]