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Penguin Opts Out of Kindle Library Lending Service

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In what is considered a move that could be followed by other top book publishers, the Penguin Group  has announced that it has asked Amazon to remove all of its e-books from the Amazon Kindle library lending service. The publisher said that security fears are the main reason it is stopping the lending of its books.

According to OverDrive, the company that works with Amazon in managing digital content to different institutions like libraries, schools and retailers, the Penguin Group said that it has asked to “suspend availability of new Penguin e-book titles from our library catalog and disable ‘Get for Kindle’  functionality for all Penguin e-books.” [Read more…]

Originally posted on November 23, 2011 @ 9:16 am

Amazon Pushes Kindle TV Ads

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Call it coincidence or a a deliberate attempt at possibly spoiling the intensifying excitement over the release of the iPad. But Amazon’s recent airing of two TV ads for Kindle is a sign that the company is not just going to let the iPad steal the Kindle’s existing dominance on the e-book market.

The two TV ads features are short snappy and trendy clips showing the theme “books in 60 seconds.” Meaning, that’s how fast you can get hold of a full edition of a published book in your Amazon Kindle, through its 3G wiresless connectivity or via the Internet. The Kindle TV Ads are pretty well done, colorful and able to send the message that the Kindle can bring “colors” to what you read.

Interestingly, Amazon has commissioned airing of the two commercials into prime time on major channels. Makes us think that Amazon has really spent a lot to push their campaign. And of course, it shows how serious they are in staying competitive against the iPad.

Here’s the other Amazon Kindle TV commercial.

Originally posted on March 26, 2010 @ 8:02 pm

Amazon Releases Kindle for BlackBerry, Still No Love for Mac

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It seems that Amazon doesn’t want me to miss its Kindle app. After getting Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC, here comes its latest iteration – Kindle for BlackBerry. I was actually waiting for the Kindle for Mac but it seems that this would still take some time. To think that I just got a BlackBerry Bold 9700 a fews ago. So, there you go folks, if you’re a BlackBerry User you may now download Kindle for BlackBerry.

The app syncs across all your Kindle accounts of course. So that when you purchase an e-book from the Kindle store through your BlackBerry app, you can still read from your PC, iPhone, iPod touch and possibly soon on your iPad, if you’re planning to get one. Of course, it goes without saying that it’s also available on the various models of Kindle e-Reader, whichever you have right now and whether you are planning to get one soon. [Read more…]

Originally posted on February 18, 2010 @ 3:10 am

Kindle is the Most Gifted Item on Amazon Ever

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Screen shot 2009-12-27 at 5.24.46 AM

Amazon should be thankful for the Holiday season as it can rest easy on the stress brought about by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony PRS e-Readers.  It looks like there are more Kindle owners right now than before as it is now the most gifted item on Amazon. And if this is not enough, on Christmas Day, Amazon achieved quite a record-breaking sale on Kindle books than the printed ones.

And no one could be more pleased than Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as he claims:

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading.”

I could just imagine Dan Brown grinning from ear to ear right now, since his new book “The Lost Symbol” is among the top-selling Kindle books on Amazon. And so did Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help.”

Going back to Amazon’s Holiday shopping report. It was noted the Amazon’s sales peak was on Dec. 14, when consumers flock to the site and ordered 7 million units of various Amazon products. Amazon shipped to over 178 countries on this day.

Aside from the Kindle, the 8GB iPod Touch, Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS unit are also among the hottest-selling Amazon Electronics products.

So, did you get any of these items as a Christmas gift?

Read the full Amazon PR here.

Originally posted on December 26, 2009 @ 5:38 pm

Amazon Lets You Bid on Ephemeral Clouds

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Amazon Web ServicesOne of the main appeals of cloud computing services is the quantized flexibility of their billing schemes — you pay only for the computing resources you need, for the amount of time you need them. That means billing can usually be adjusted on two dimensions: resources required and duration of use.

Now Amazon, ever thinking out of the box, adds a third dimension to the billing flexibility of their cloud computing services: market demand. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (more popularly known as Amazon EC2) has launched a new service: Spot Instances. Now you can bid for Amazon’s spare computing resources as they fall within your price range in real time.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances carry a Spot Price based on current market demand. You can bid on those instances in an open market. Whenever your bid matches or exceeds the Spot Price, your instances start running. Whenever the Spot Price exceeds your bid, your instances are terminated. Persistent Spot Instances will automatically restart once the Spot Price equals or falls below your bid, whereas one-time Spot Instances will simply terminate without restart. Regardless of how high you bid, you never pay more than the actual Spot Price.

As you can imagine, this system results in your rented computing instances running whenever they meet your price, and stopping whenever they don’t. That’s fantastic for controlling costs, but it’s unusable for any application that needs to stay up and running for any fixed continuous amount of time. Unless you want to place ridiculously high bids, don’t expect to run any high-availability systems on EC2 Spot Instances: Web sites, game servers, healthcare systems, battlefield control systems, et cetera.

The silver lining on this ephemeral cloud, however, is that it’s great for any application that doesn’t need to stay up and running for any fixed continuous amount of time: image and video processing, scientific research data processing, financial modeling and analysis, pharmaceutical and life sciences simulations, et cetera.

This eBay-style bidding approach to selling cloud computing resources should prove to be a very interesting experiment. It’ll almost certainly save people a pretty penny on rented computing power, so long as their applications don’t have to be available on demand. If Amazon EC2’s Spot Instances model proves successful, expect other cloud computing providers to come up with their own bidding systems.

Originally posted on December 14, 2009 @ 6:34 am