Apple Hits 1 Billion Apps a Week, Starts 2012 With Focus on eBooks. As Apple celebrates its part of 1.2 billion app downloads last week, those centuries-past, paper-based tomes are the focus of the company’s first big news in 2012. While we’re sure it is hard at work on a budget iPad and a new [...]
Amazon announced this morning that customers can now purchase Kindle books as gifts for anyone with an email address, whether or not they own a Kindle device. To give a Kindle book as a gift, you just find the book on Amazon, select “give as a gift,” input the email address of the person you’d [...]
On Friday, Amazon made two big announcements about the Kindle. The first is the coming availability of Kindle newspapers and magazines on Kindle apps and not just on the Kindle device itself. This is long overdue–many readers no longer use their Kindles much, but still read most of their e-books through Kindle apps on their [...]
Amazon.com apparently loves them some iOS, offering up free universal apps for both Amazon Mobile and Kindle. Now the world’s biggest online store has added a new iPad-specific app that brings a whole new shopping experience. On Tuesday, Amazon.com introduced their new Amazon Windowshop, an iPad-specific app that promises “a top to bottom rewrite of Amazon.com [...]
Amazon posted its usual big jump in top line sales, with the third quarter revenue increasing 38.7%, to $7.56 billion, while net income rose 16%, to $231 million. The largest gains came in its electronics and other general merchandise segment where sales rose 68% overall and 80% in North America. The segment, which benefited from [...]
Amazon and Target are now selling the Apple iPad. Previously, the device had only been available from Apple’s online and retail stores, as well as from Best Buy. The move into other outlets heats up the competition between iPad and the E-Ink Big Three, Sony, Kindle, and Nook, all of which are available in various retail [...]
Oh, we love nothing more than a good juicy rumor around MacLife. We were devoted followers of every single tidbit in the run up to the release of the iPad and beyond. Now it looks like there could be another tablet in the running to be the iPad Killah, if these rumors about Amazon can be [...]
It has been a bumpy year for Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book chain, with 720 stores. Sales and store traffic have suffered as the book business has shifted online; Amazon has held its early lead in the e-reader war; and early this month, Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale and is now [...]
Amazon is taking another step offline, making its Kindle e-reader available in Staples stores this Fall, reports Reuters. The device is already available in select Target stores. Staples will sell all three current models of the e-reader, the $130 WiFi-only model, as well as the more expensive 3G and large-screen DX. So, assuming they can keep [...]
VOLUMES have been written about technology’s ability to connect people. But burying one’s nose in a book has always been somewhat isolating — with its unspoken assertion that the reader does not want to be disturbed. So what about a device that occupies the evolving intersection between? “Strangers constantly ask about it,” Michael Hughes, a [...]
Lots of Little Improvements Make the Kindle 3 The Best E-Ink eReader This is the best E-Ink device you can get right now. The changes and updates, while very cool, might not, however, justify scrapping your Kindle 2 in exchange for a Kindle 3–they’re still pretty similar. But the much-crisper screen, faster processor, newly laid [...]
The world’s largest book retailer, Barnes & Noble, announced Tuesday that its board of directors is considering selling the company in order to increase shareholder value. As the bookseller explained today, the board has formed a team to evaluate “strategic alternatives” to make sure it’s “taking advantage of [its] compelling digital opportunities.” Putting the company [...]
What would you do for $15,000 is Amazon.com gift cards? That’s a lot of MP3s, Kindle books, or vacuum bags, or whatever it is you order a lot of from Amazon–maybe even print books! You can win those gift cards by entering Amazon’s just-announced “Kindle Commercial Contest.” More from Amazon.com… “Ever had an idea for a TV commercial [...]