Tag Archives | Amazon.com

A Slightly Cheaper, Ad-Supported Kindle

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 11, 2011 at 4:52 pm

Back in August of last year, Slate’s Farhad Majoo predicted that the Kindle–$139 as of the time he wrote his story–would be $99 by the holidays. His prognostication that didn’t pan out: the Kindle’s price stayed put at $139. But Amazon just announced a new Kindle at a lower price. It’s called the Kindle with Special Offers, and it’s the $139 Kindle with the new twist of promotions for deals at the bottom of the home screen and on the screen saver (but not within books themselves). It sells for $114, or $25 less than its ad-free counterpart.

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I Own a "Vast Kindle Library," and I'm Worried

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 5, 2011 at 7:49 pm

Today, I wanted to buy a book. I did what I usually do these days before I plunk down my money for one: I checked to see if it was available as an Amazon Kindle e-book–one which I’d be able read not only on a Kindle but also on an iPad, an iPhone, an Android phone, a Mac, or a PC. It was. My finger instinctively lunged towards the 1-Click button.

And then it dawned on me: With the recent development that Apple is going to require creators of e-reader apps to sell books using its in-app purchasing feature, it’s not the least bit clear what the fate of Kindle books on Apple devices will be. (Apple says that as long as e-readers support in-app purchases, they’ll be able to retain access to digital books bought elsewhere–even though this violates the App Store approval guidelines.)

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PlayStation 3 On Sale at Amazon for $40? Probably Not!

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 16, 2011 at 7:04 pm

[New information: Target has issued a statement, saying all orders will be cancelled. See it here]

I’m not sure whether it’s an error on Amazon’s part, or an unannounced sale: Sony’s PlayStation 3 is on sale at the site for $39.99. The retailer itself is not offering the console at this price, instead Target appears to be the source.

Obviously people have rushed to take advantage of this, and it is already appearing out of stock. I am viewing this skeptically: the deal seems too good to be true, and the PS3 is nowhere near to being discontinued.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out. That said, I have ordered myself one just in case.

Update 1: People are noting that Target’s website is also showing this, but the weight is off and appears to be a Move accessory. Still, the error means Somebody’s going to get a stern talking to Monday morning…

Update 2: The order when placed comes as a confirmation that you’ve purchased the Move “shooter grip” accessory, a reader reports. However, the cancellation notice shows you’ve canceled a 60GB PlayStation 3.

Update 3: Looks like as of 3am ET, the item has been removed from Amazon, and on Target’s website there’s no more $39.99 PS3. More reports coming in indicate that in some cases, the confirmation e-mails do say that it is the console, and not the accessory as others have seen. We have mails out to both target and Amazon for comment on the matter.

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Amazon's Raw Deal for Android Developers

Posted by Ed Oswald on January 16, 2011 at 2:31 am

Amazon’s move to build an app store for Android may have initially sounded like a good idea, but in the end it could end up screwing the developers that would make it all possible. How so? A little-publicized stipulation of its agreement with developers: the retailer sets the price.

Developers would still get to say what they’d like to sell their application for, an MSRP if you will. But Amazon does not guarantee that’s what its customers will pay. Instead, the retailer may choose to sell the app at a discount — just like Amazon does for other items on its site — or even give it away for free.

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E-Readers: They're All Selling Like an Unspecified Number of Hotcakes!

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 30, 2010 at 10:04 am

Back in August, I wrote about Amazon.com’s odd habit of frequently bragging about sales of its Kindle e-reader without ever providing explicit numbers. It continues to do so–and it’s inspired its competitors to do some similarly evasive crowing of their own.

Barnes & Noble issued a press release today that it had sold “millions” of Nooks since the first version’s release in December of 2009. But it mostly bragged about Nook sales without disclosing them, by saying that Nooks are the company’s best-selling products ever, and that the Nookcolor is its best-selling gift this holiday season.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced that with millions of NOOK eReading devices sold, the line has become the company’s biggest bestseller ever in its nearly 40-year history.  The new NOOKcolor Reader’s Tablet, introduced just eight weeks before Christmas, is the company’s number one selling gift of the holiday season. Barnes & Noble also announced that it now sells more digital books than its large and growing physical book business on BN.com, the world’s second largest online bookstore.

[snip]

Demand for the critically acclaimed NOOKcolor remained high following the product’s introduction in late October through the holidays. Sales have continued to exceed the company’s high expectations.

The only hard number in the release is the “millions” of Nooks sold; we can apparently assume that B&N has sold at least two million devices. (A few weeks ago, it was a minor news story when an Amazon staffer said that “millions” of third-generation Kindles had been sold in 73 days; I wonder if B&N would have been even this specific if Amazon hadn’t made the leap first?)

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This Dumb Year: The 57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 21, 2010 at 1:33 am

Progress–to swipe an ancient General Electric slogan–is the technology industry’s most important product. Its second-most important product? That’s easy: blunders. In fact, you could argue that the two are inextricably intertwined. An industry that was more uptight about making mistakes might be more cautious and therefore less inventive.

It’s also sometimes difficult to tell where progress ends and blunder begins, or vice versa. If you believe that Google Wave was a bad idea in the first place, you might think it was smart of Google to kill it this year–but if you thought Wave had promise, then it’s Google’s early cancellation that’s the gaffe.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that while the industry’s lame moments are…well, lame, they can also be important. Last year, I summed up a decade’s worth of tech screw-ups and came up with 87 examples. This time around, I’m covering only a single year–but I found 57 items worth commemorating. No, tech companies aren’t getting more error prone; I was just more diligent. And as usual, there was plenty of ground to cover.

Thanks once again to Business 2.0’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business and, of course, to Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards for inspiring this. Here we go…

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