When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.

On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses–WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome–were given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos ’86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.

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One sign that Steve Jobs is back to his old self: He’s already sniping at rivals.

After Apple’s (AAPL) iPod launch event on Wednesday, the New York Times’ David Pogue asked the CEO whether he has doubts–as he’s expressed in the past–about the market for e-readers, especially Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle.

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The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply.

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In the future, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices.

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Amazon.com’s first-quarter earnings grew 24 percent to $177 million, compared with the year-ago period, while net sales rose 18 percent to $4.89 billion.

In a statement, Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos said sales of its Kindle e-book reader “exceeded our most optimistic expectations.”

The online retailer said it expects second-quarter net sales of $4.3 billion to $4.75 billion, a 6 to 17 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter.

Stay tuned for highlights from its 5 p.m. EST call with analysts.

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While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer–Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?–a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

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If we’re in a recession, you wouldn’t know it from looking at Amazon.com’s (AMZN) June quarter results.

Amazon shares are up sharply in an otherwise ugly market Thursday morning, propelled onward by some gushing post-earnings commentary from the Street. The key points: The company’s revenue in the June quarter actually accelerated from the March quarter, despite a weakening economy. Some analysts credit Amazon for this; other say it suggests increased consumer reliance on online shopping. Skeptics think Amazon can’t hold off economic pressures forever, and the bears think the stock is simply too expensive. But clearly, today belongs to the Amazon longs.

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Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos has taken a stake in Twitter, the red-hot microblogging service. Twitter announced the move in a blog post Tuesday. Bezos made the investment through Bezos Expeditions, a vehicle for his personal investments. Also investing in the company is venture firm Spark Capital; partner Bijan Sabet will take a seat on the Twitter board.

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How I Realized that Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader Were Exceeding Sales Estimates
When the Kindle first launched there was plenty of predictions about how it and its predecessor the Sony Reader would sell. Over time the chatter died down, halted partly by the Kindle going out of stock. At the end of April, the chatter returned and hit full volume after last week’s Book Expo America in Los Angeles. The catalyst was Jeff Bezos’s speech, which let out some tantalizing, yet cryptic, information on e-book sales volume at the Kindle store. The chatter, as reported in the New York Times, has publishers and others speculating that Amazon has sold somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 Kindles. I think all the speculations are completely wrong. By my calculations, combined sales of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader will be 1,000,000 units in 2008.

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There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn’t for, say, IBM, Sun or HP.

In a brief but illuminating video interview with Om Malik, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos underscores this point in describing the origins of Amazon Web Services. “Four years ago is when it started,” he says, “and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups. Amazon is, you know, just a web-scale application.”

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Today at the D6:Conference, the corporate doyens and business leaders were out in full force, both on and off stage. Those who were grilled on stage showed were true to their form–Amazon’s Jeff Bezos charmed everyone with optimism for Kindle, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang was all emotion and patience, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook showed that he is still a young fella brimming with big dreams.

But it was the wily old Fox, News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch who proved to the most charming, candid, amusing, honest and informative at the same time. Candid enough to admit that there isn’t anyone to really compete with him. Honest enough to point out what a mess both Microsoft and Yahoo made out of their deal, and Google is still a great partner. About Yahoo and Microsoft he said: I’m mystified. I can’t understand the whole thing? Neither can we, Mr. Murdoch. He talked at length about the future of media, both on and offline. His responses to a barrage of questions was lucid and refreshingly without corporate speak. He talked about online video, Hulu and future of movie distribution.

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The saga of the Kindle, the product so popular that nobody has one, continues. Jeff Bezos has turned Amazon.com’s home page into an apology/ad for the device.

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