Years from now, when I tell the grandkids about this thing called print books, I’ll reference the past few days as the week e-books won the war. Momentum is rapidly pushing the dominant industry focus in book publishing and selling toward digital. In my weekly analysis over at GigaOM Pro, I highlight three major milestones from this week that point to the beginning of the end…  Read More →

Borders today launched both an electronic book store and two handset clients — for BlackBerry and Android 2.0 devices — as it tries to compete against offerings from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. According to Reuters,  the new Borders eBook store boasts 1.5 million titles (both free and paid) and lags only behind Amazon in terms of volume. And similar to Amazon, Borders is embracing e-books as a platform across multiple devices,... 

Amazon’s success as an online retailer is the stuff that entrepreneurial dreams are made of. In 15 years, Amazon has defined and continued to shape how we shop online — especially for media like books, movies and music. The company controls 8 percent of media sales , whether online or in stores. Wal-Mart, by contrast, controls 7.7 percent of all retails categories. So Amazon has emerged as the Wal-Mart of media retail. But as opposed... 

Heroku, a platform provider built on top of Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure, has raised $10 million in its second round of funding, bringing its total investment to $15 million. In the last six months, the Heroku platform, which was developed for Ruby on Rails applications, has seen the number of apps it hosts rise to 60,000 from 40,000 . The funding led by Ignition Partners with participation by existing investors Redpoint Venture... 

As it stands now, the e-book industry is dominated by two closed and proprietary giants: Amazon and Apple. Both have e-book platforms — the Kindle and the iPad — which they design, manufacture and control, and both have been busy trying to convince book publishers to do business with them, with Amazon pushing for lower prices and Apple giving in to publishers’ demands for a more flexible approach. The landscape will change... 

I just finished a book — Richard Price’s excellent “Lush Life” — hardly a noteworthy feat except it’s the first book I’ve read cover to cover in several months. It languished for years on my reading list, which has itself grown longer by the week. In fact, of all the books I’ve read in my life, a shockingly small percentage have been read in the past several years…  Read More →

If you’re interested in books, either the old-fashioned kind or the electronic kind, you’ve probably caught wind of a major dustup going on between Amazon and book publisher Macmillan, over what price Macmillan should be allowed to charge for its e-books. Macmillan took out a full-page ad in the magazine Publishers Lunch to inform authors, retailers and readers that Amazon had yanked all of its books from the company’s electronic... 

If all goes as expected on Wednesday , we will soon find ourselves in a world of tablets, with the Apple iTablet (or whatever it’s going to be called) joining the market-leading Kindle. The one thing everyone seems fixated on is the effect that these devices are having — or will have — on the book-publishing industry. Amazon’s Kindle is currently the leader in the e-book business, but it’s widely expected that will... 

What goes up, they say, must come down. But there are exceptions, such as Amazon’s stock. Despite persistent complaints that it’s too expensive, the company consistently manages to defy them with surprisingly strong growth. And as Amazon pulls out of the worst recession in decades, it’s capable of reaching the level of scale that until now has only been seen by one retailer: Wal-Mart. Indeed, Amazon already dominates e-commerce,... 

Amazon, displaying a sense of urgency, perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet style computer is turning its Kindle device into a platform. The Seattle-based company today announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active content” and distribute it through the “Kindle Store later this year.” Amazon will be giving out a Kindle Development Kit that will give “developers... 

“It doesn’t feel like a recession here.” Over the past few months, I’ve heard several people who either visited or moved to the San Francisco Bay Area make that comment . The effects of the Great Recession are still painful in many regions of the country, but the relative health of the tech industry has left many in Silicon Valley and San Francisco feeling they dodged a deadly bullet. While the economy’s longer-term health remains... 

Have you noticed that online shopping actually works great lately? The product pictures are appealing and zoom-worthy, the checkout pages don’t lose your credit card info after you accidentally leave out your zip code, the free shipping is doled out generously, and the prices are often discounted. You’re not alone. In fact, customer satisfaction with the top 40 U.S. online retailers during the holiday season was higher than it ever... 

Like an old sports injury, the rumor of Amazon buying Netflix seems to flare up once every few months. It happened again this week when a Reuters reporter tweeted about its impact on stock-options trading, and the meme gained traction when other blogs ran with it . The recurring rumors have always proven false. Because if anyone isn’t taking them seriously, it’s Amazon. The online retailer’s chronic allergy to sales taxes has kept it from... 

txtr , a Berlin-based startup, is building an e-reader that it hopes will be Europe’s answer to the Amazon Kindle. Christophe Maire, CEO of the company, sat down with me in Paris earlier this week and gave me the details. He is one of the co-founders of gate5, a German navigation/mapping service that was acquired by Nokia in 2006 . While Maire went to work for the Finnish phone giant, his co-founders started txtr, and Maire only just joined... 

As a “type A” student, I routinely tried to write down nearly everything my teachers wrote on the chalkboard. Aside from blisters and far too many trips to the pencil sharpener, I’m not sure my approach yielded much. But it was useful to be able to refer back to a teacher’s illustrations or mathematical formulas from time to time. These days, we have electronic textbooks to read and tablet computers to document our thoughts...