At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified.
In the future, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own.
Venture capitalists view the decision by e-book pioneer E Ink Corp. to sell out to a Taiwanese company as one more sign of the moribund IPO market.
E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., would once have been a sure-fire candidate for an initial public offering. Its sales more than doubled to $18 million in the first quarter on the strength of rising sales of products like Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, which use E Ink technology.
Prime View International, a Taiwanese company that makes an e-readers display part, said today it would purchase E-Ink, a company that provides the digital ink technology in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, for $215 million.
Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader has already inspired hope for new digital business models for book and newspaper publishers. Now the Kindle wants to do business with bloggers too.
Just when I was coming to terms with my ambivalence toward my Kindle e-book reader, Amazon and the publishers have gotten greedy.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the device since I bought my first one about 9 months ago.
As a frequent traveler and voracious reader, I’ve found the Kindle to be nearly ideal. I never have fewer than a dozen books in its memory, and they’re always things I want to read.
Some tech-savvy fliers find it a bit frustrating that they’re asked to turn off their Kindles and e-readers for takeoffs and landings.
The Kindle DX, displaying a page from The New York Times, is demonstrated at a news conference Wednesday.
Amazon.com is absolutely on fire. The company posted Q1 results that blew away estimates, with EPS of 41 cents a dime ahead of the Street, as both gross margins and operating margin expanded in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
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 CEO Jeff Bezos said sales of its Kindle e-book reader “exceeded our most optimistic expectations.”
As a few more libraries begin lending the Kindle, the e-book reading device from Amazon, the company continues to offer ambiguous messages regarding its policies.
Amazon still hasn’t said how many of its Kindle e-book readers have sold. But here’s one true sign of the gadget’s growing popularity: People are protesting it on several fronts.
Until quite recently, I’d seen a Kindle only once. It was at a friend’s house, only for a moment, and my general impression was that it was clunky and only borderline readable.
Is the digital savior of the sagging magazine industry finally in sight?
On Wednesday, Fujitsu Frontech began selling the world’s first color e-paper e-book reader. Available on April 20 in Japan only, the gadget costs 99,970 yen, or more than $1,000.
Until now, e-books like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have been limited to black and white or shades of gray, making them OK for reading plain books and newspapers that like to use stipple drawings, but not great for colorful print media such as magazines.
Amazon has caved into demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the Kindle to read a book aloud. This is very bad news.
It’s hard not to love Amazon’s new e-book reader. For starters, it’s gorgeous. Unlike its bulky predecessor, the redesigned $359 Kindle, which came out this week, is light, thin, and disappears in your hands. In my few days using it, I was won over: The Kindle is the future of publishing. And that’s what scares me.
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