Amazon.com is launching the Kindle in Canada soon. The Kindle was rolled out internationally last month but Canada was not on the list at the time. In Canada the Kindle will have access to over 300,000 books and several Canadian newspapers. Some of the Canadian newspapers that can be downloaded on the Kindle include the Globe & Mail and The National Post. The Kindle will be able to store about 1,500 books and is available online for $259. The reason for the delay is believed to be negotiations with telecommunication companies and Amazon.com.
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.
Plastic Logic announced in a press release that its e-book reader will feature AT&T 3G. Barnes & Noble’s ebook store is the exclusive content supplier for the upcoming reader. The reader hopes to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.
The press release did not mention anything about pricing but an extra fee is likely involved. AT&T will slap a fee onto anything. The Kindle’s wireless access is provided by Sprint at no extra charge.
The reader uses E-ink technology. It is under .25 inches think and weighs less than a magazine. It comes with a touch screen and has Wi-Fi support.
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.
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.
Yesterday at a Wired conference, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos indicated what direction the Kindle device and the Kindle book store may be taking. Bezos said that he foresees the Kindle books and Kindle readers becoming two separate businesses.
“We are going to give the device team competition” by having Kindle books available on “mobile devices and other computing devices,” stated Bezos. Bezos did not specify which other devices Kindle books would be offered.
Amazon.com was even considering whether to offer the Kindle at a lower price with a monthly subscription price. But he preferred a one time higher price to keep things simple.
Shan Sadiq | May 7, 2009 | 648 views | Comments Categorized under Amazon, Kindle
During a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of newspapers, James Moroney, CEO of the Dallas Morning News, said that Amazon demands 70% of subscription revenue from news papers.
Here is his comment:
“The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?”
