Amazon got its start as an online book seller, expanded to electronics and other retail categories, then returned to its roots with its own Kindle reader devices. More recently, though, it expanded with Kindle applications that let people read books on the iPhone and iPod Touch and on Windows computers. After purchasing rights to read [...]

Smelling blood in the water after Amazon caved to Macmillan’s demand to stop selling e-books of their titles for only $10, News Corp Chief Rupert Murdoch says he, too, wants that deal.

Murdoch’s media empire includes HarperCollins books, which has had 20 titles on New York Times best-seller lists in the past three months, including Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue ($29) and the hot political tome Game Change ($28). Reuters reports Murdoch told analysts Tuesday that Amazon appears “ready to sit down with us again” and renegotiate the deal under which Amazon prices new e-book titles at $9.99. That’s even though the publisher still gets a wholesale payment based on a higher price and Amazon eats the loss itself.

My co-author, Matt Miller, is a huge ebook reader fan. As a result, when Amazon announced the Kindle Development Kit he was less than excited, since he prefers to read on his ebook reader, and would rather have Amazon spend its time making even more formats work on the Kindle. Other folks at ZDNet have been weighing in, too with opinions both in favor of and against the expansion of the Kindle’s functionality.

Amazon on Wednesday outlined a new royalty option for its Kindle platform where authors and publishers can get 70 percent of list price net of delivery costs. There are a few catches in the royalty package, but Amazon appears to be throwing authors and publishers and e-book bone in an effort to keep prices down.

Firefox has just turned five, and it’s doubtful anybody outside of Redmond begrudges Mozilla’s celebrations. The open-source browser now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications, and has brought a radical rethink in what we expect from a browser.

In the spirit of giving, hackers have claimed success in cracking copyright protections on Amazon’s Kindle eReader, allowing eBooks to be exported to other devices.
The eBooks will take the form of a pdf file, allowing it to be easily shared around the Kindle community and other file supporting devices.
Israeli hacker Labba is [...]

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In October 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share, up from 64.9 percent in September. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.9 [...]