You may remember the story of Justin Gawronski. Gawronski filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com because the books 1984 and Animal Farm were deleted from his Kindle shortly after he purchased the books. Gawronski’s homework was also deleted from the Kindle.
Amazon.com settled with Gawronski and the law firm representing him by paying $150,000 to settle. After paying the cost of the lawyers, the rest of the money will be donated to charity. Gawronski will receive a $30 gift certificate too.
The reason why 1984 and Animal Farm was deleted is because a company that did not own the rights to the books added them to the Kindle store. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos stated the incident was “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” Gawronski is a high school senior that lives and studies in south-eastern Michigan.
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) claims that they have learned from their previous mistakes of selling fresh groceries online. However in the next 3 months, Amazon.com decided to launch a grocery business again but it will be limited to the Seattle area. The grocery service is called Amazon Fresh.
Amazon will be limiting the advertising for the service in order to keep the costs low. The company will also limit how fast they expand to other cities. Amazon Fresh launched as a test project a couple of years ago and currently operates in about 49 Seattle zip codes.
WebVan and PublixDirect shut down in 2001 and 2003 respectively. WebVan filed for bankruptcy and PublixDirect did not get much sales volume. “We have a lot of confidence in the long-term economics,” stated Amazon.com VP of Consumables Doug Herrington in an interview. “For a significant portion of the population, they’re going to find that the convenience, selection and pricing of online grocery shopping is going to be really compelling.” WebVan.com is currently owned by Amazon.com and it is used to sell food items too.
Google has made an offer to competitors in the form of copyright-right free books. Google is in the process of digitizing millions of books as part of the Google Book Search project. These books are generally out-of-copyright material and can be downloaded in PDF format. The books are scanned using optical character recognition technology such as the Elphel 323 camera which can scan 1,000 pages per hour.
This project has been the subject of controversy and currently there is a congressional hearing on Google Book Search. To mitigate criticism, Google announced that anyone, including competitors can resell the books Google has scanned. Amazon.com critcized Google for their role claiming that they cheated the system by scanning books without permission.
“For the out-of-print books being made available through the Google Books settlement, we will let any book retailer sell access to those books,” stated Google’s SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond at a hearing. “Google will host the digital books online, and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore will be able to sell access to users on any internet-connected device they choose.”
However Amazon.com has not interest in participating because they believe Google cheated their way into the digitzation project by scanning books without permission. “The internet has never been about intermediation,” stated Amazon.com VP of Public Policy Paul Misener. “We are happy to work with rights holders without anyone else’s help.”
Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Xconomy, and Mass High Tech has invested $7 million into Heartland Robotics. Heartland is a robotics company that is currently in stealth-mode and is based in Cambridge, Mass.
Heartland describes themselves as “combining the power of computers — embodied in robots — and the extraordinary intelligence of the American workforce, to increase productivity and revitalize manufacturing.” The company will be unveiling their products in the next several months.
One of the reasons why Bezos himself may be interested in robotics is because of the way that Amazon.com utilizes robotics within their distribution and fulfillment centers. Zappos.com, a company that Amazon.com recently acquired has a massive distribution center in Louisville, Kentucky.
One of the co-founders in Heartland includes Rodney Brooks. Brooks is a professor in robotics at M.I.T. and also previously founded iRobot.
Amazon.com issued a warning that the Sony PS 3 Slim is having supply shortages. This is why they are limiting the sales of the Slim to one per person. Sony Europe says that they have “trucks and trailers” of the Slim on traveling across the continent overseas. Better luck in September if you want to get a hold of the device.
Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Yahoo! Inc. are joining several nonprofit groups and other library associations to oppose a class-action settlement that would give Google the rights to digitize millions of books.
The settlement is still waiting on court approval. The Department of Justice has also opened an antitrust investigation to explore some of the agreement terms.
The coalition against the Google Book project is called the Open Book Alliance. The Alliance is led by Gary L. Reback, an antitrust lawyer working out of Silicon Valley.
Target Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc. have a great relationship with each other. Amazon.com provides the front and back end of the Target.com website and Target delivers the orders. This has been the relationship that both retail companies have had over the past 10 years. However Target will be ending the deal starting in 2011.
Target plans to start running their own website around the same time and will replace Amazon.com from handling the customer care, technology, and order fulfillment. Through the partnership, Amazon.com helped Target save money and improve customer service.
“We’ve had a very positive, productive relationship with Amazon,” stated Target spokeswoman Kelly Basgen. “We just thought it was in our best interest to grow and manage our own platform.” Target made the announcement this past Friday.
Disclosure: I was a former employee of Target Corporation as a Supply Chain Executive-in-Training from 2007-2008.
Amazon.com has announced that they have developed a mobile application for phones powered by Google Android. The application is called the “Amazon App For Android.” The application will be available free for download.
Amazon App For Android has a feature called Amazon Remembers. Amazon Remembers is a feature that allows Android users to take pictures of a barcode and match it to a product that Amazon.com is selling. The application also remembers the items that you took a picture of so it is easy to find again.
Amazon App For Android is one out of many applications that Amazon.com has launched. Other applications include Amazon App for iPhone and iPod Touch and the Amazon App for BlackBerry.
Amazon.com acquired Zappos for $928 million in July. As part of the acquisition, Amazon.com also owns the domain name Clothes.com. Zappos originally bought the domain name from Idealab for $4.9 million. These details were discussed in the SEC filing of the acquisition.
Below is a statement from the SEC filing:
In May 2008, we acquired the Clothes.com internet domain name from Idealab. The domain name was recognized as a purchased intangible asset with a useful life of 20 years. The entire purchase price of $4.9 million was assigned to the price of the domain name intangible asset and will be amortized on a straight-line basis over its remaining estimated useful life.
At the $4.9 million transaction Clothes.com was the second biggest domain name sale in 2008. The first biggest was Fund.com which was at $10 million. Clothes.com forwards to Zappos.com’s clothing section.
Back in the day when I was a kid, when people forgot their homework, they would frantically try to complete it about 15 minutes beforehand or say that you got a computer virus and it was deleted it. Now there is a more high-tech reason why you may have lost your homework.
Amazon.com recently had 1984 deleted from thousands of Kindles and Justin Gawronski lost his electronic notes for the book. Now there is a class action lawsuit against Amazon.com as a result of the deletion. The class action lawsuit is seeking punitive damages from Amazon for those that were affected by the deletion of the book. The lawsuit is also seeking an injuction that forbids Amazon from improperly accessing the Kindle in the future too.
1984 is a novel about a civil servant named Winston Smith that was assigned the task of promoting a regime’s agenda by manipulating records and political literature. In turn, Smith starts a rebellion against the regime and is arrested and tortured as a result. The coincidence that it was this novel that caused a civil lawsuit against Amazon.com just makes it even more newsworthy.
The University of Michigan (U of M) and Amazon.com is partnering on making books no longer in copyright available for purchase as reprints. The agreement was made between U of M and Amazon.com subsidiary BookSurge.
The original books are contained within the U of M Library. ”This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time,” stated U of M librarian and dean of libraries Paul N. Courant.
The reprint program includes books that have been digitized by the U of M book scanning partnership with Google. Over 400,000 books across 200 languages have been scanned so far. U of M will be setting the prices of the reprints and the university will be sharing revenue with BookSurge.
Amazon.com has decided to cut the price of the Kindle from $359 to $299. The Kindle 2 was introduced back in February. Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener said that the company is dropping the price because they are decreasing costs to manufacture the device. However the Kindle DX will remain at a price of $489.
The success of the Kindle will add about $310 million in revenue and $70 million to the bottom line for Amazon.com. This will give the company a rise in $2 billion in revenue and $560 million in profit by 2012 according to Sandeep Aggarwal, a research analyst at Collins Stewart.
Currently there are about 300,000 books available for download on the Kindle. When the first generation Kindle was introduced, there was about 90,000 books available.
Amazon.com has filed for a couple of patents that imply that there will be books supported by advertising available for download. The e-books that have advertising built in would be free or discounted.
The advertising patent that was filed earlier this month was entitled “Incorporating Advertising In On-Demand Generated Content.” The other advertising patent was called “On-Demand Generating E-Book Content With Advertising.”
Amazon.com subsidiary Amazon Technologies filed for a patent called “Method and system for access to electronic version of a physical work based on user ownership of the physical work” back in December 2006. The patent was approved last month. This allows buyers of a physical book to receive an e-book bundle.
One of the reasons why consumers may be resistant to purchasing a Kindle is the price-per-book cost on top of the already high price of the Kindle. Having books available for free may encourage more people to buy the Kindle.
Microsoft Corporation’s newest operating system is selling on Amazon.com at a discounted price. Because of this discounted price, the operating system is selling like crazy. As a matter of fact, the Microsoft operating systems are the top selling items on Amazon right now.
The pre-orders of the Windows 7 Home Premium edition is selling for $49.99 and the Windows 7 Professional edition is selling for $99.99. The discounted prices are available until July 11, 2009 in U.S. and Canada. In Japan, the operating systems will be available for those prices on July 5, 2009. The Home edition was number one on electronic product sales and the Professional version was ranked number two.
Earlier this week Amazon.com announced that the source code for Kindle devices has been open sourced. The code is based on Linux kernel 2.6.22 with 2.1 software along with E Ink drivers and other hardware drivers. The licenses for the code is unknown too, but it believed to be the GNU General Public License. The code for the original Kindle, the Kindle DX, and the Kindle 2 is available here.
