Amazon's on-demand streaming video offering just got a whole lot more attractive. The company announced today that they signed a deal with Viacom, allowing them to offer thousands of new videos from sources like MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon, among others.
In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.
Good E-Reader reports today that Amazon plans to launch a retail store in its hometown of Seattle "within the next few months." It will be a small boutique emphasizing its Kindle e-readers and physical copies of its Amazon Exclusives book titles. It will also stock accessories for Kindles, such as cases, screen protectors and USB chargers.
It's not a new rumor (it dates as far back as 2009), and it would be a departure from Amazon's strategy thus far. In December, LAUNCH reported the retail store rumor, adding that Amazon plans to sell its own branded merchandise. Amazon is better known for threatening real-world retail than for promoting it. But Amazon's moves in the past few months make the strategy seem more sensible.
Amazon is notorious for sharing very little information about how its products and business units perform. Its new Kindle Fire tablet is no different.
Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn't disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold.
Instead, Amazon just shared a few statistics designed to make it seem like the Kindle business is doing really well, without actually proving it.
Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its "many restrictions." It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company's data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. "Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected," Goodreads says.
The problem most visible to users will be missing cover images. Goodreads is in the process of uploading replacements. One percent of Goodreads books will appear blank, listed as "Unknown Title" and "Unknown Author," while Goodreads looks for a new data source for them. There's a great lesson here about building a business on top of a competitor's API, but Goodreads has made the switch in the nick of time.
Google Maps and Google Earth just got their second update of 2012 to add 45º imagery, which now covers 17 U.S. and seven international cities. These 45º views cause buildings to cast shadows and rotate with real perspective. It's an almost-3D view that makes the satellite view of a place more realistic while still supporting most systems.
45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.
Amazon has released a new 'Send to Kindle' feature for PC users. It's a downloadable extension for Windows that adds a "Send to Kindle" option when right-clicking on a file in Windows Explorer or in the print dialog in any application.
Files sent with Send to Kindle go to the user's Kindle Library, and they can be downloaded on the e-ink Kindle models as well as the iOS Kindle app. The last-read page, bookmarks, notes and highlights are synchronized automatically, except for PDFs. The Kindle Fire is not listed. Support for Mac is "coming soon."
Amazon reports today that the Kindle E-Book Lending Library now offers over 75,000 books, boosted by the launch of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program for independent publishers. The KDP Select program launched in December, and Kindle customers borrowed 295,000 KDP Select titles that month. The top authors in the program earned thousands of dollars on top of their regular monthly sales.
Amazon increased its monthly funding for KDP Select from $500,000 to $700,000 this month after the strong showing. KDP authors earned $1.70 per borrow. The top 10 KDP Select authors saw a 30% increase from lending on top of the royalties they earned from sales of the same titles. Amazon's end-run around Big Publishing shows promise for authors.
Amazon has launched a more touch-friendly, Web-based iPad Kindle Store. A tablet-optimized Kindle store was available through the HTML5 Kindle Cloud Reader Amazon launched last August, but the new iPad Kindle Store is a standalone Web app. Upon visiting amazon.com/iPadKindleStore from Safari, a pop-up prompts the user to add it to the home screen. This is the most seamless way for Kindle users to buy books on the iPad.
Apple's in-app purchasing rules prevent e-book sellers from offering stores in their native apps (without giving Apple a 30% cut). The route around that was to include a link to the Web store inside the native reader app. Last July, Apple forced Amazon and other e-reader apps to remove this link, so users of e-book platforms other than Apple's iBooks must buy their books in the browser, in a separate place from where they read.
One of the biggest detriments to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet is that it does not support location-based services. This was likely a choice from Amazon to leave GPS hardware out of the device to cut down on costs. The lack of location services on the Fire greatly hinders what kind of apps can run on the device. One company has figured out a way around the Fire's restrictions and is bringing its navigation app to the Fire.
HopStop is a metropolitan navigation app that gives door-to-door directions for pedestrians, cyclists, taxis and mass transit in over 200 cities in the United States and Canada. Without location services on a device, HopStop's app is basically useless. Enter location provider Skyhook with a simple fix to a complex problem.
Not unsurprisingly, this holiday season was a big one for the world's biggest e-commerce retailer. But it wasn't just all those remote-controlled, inflatable flying sharks and Forever Lazy pajamas people ordered. Among the biggest winners this year was Amazon's line of Kindle e-readers and, naturally, the e-books that go on them.
Kindles flew off Amazon's digital shelves at a rate of over 1 million per week during the month of December and occupied the top three slots on the company's site-wide bestseller list. The #1 position was held by the Kindle Fire, which was also the most gifted and wished-for item on the entire site, according to data released today by Amazon.
