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.
Amazon is making a move to highlight its wealth of music, books, TV shows, movies, apps and games today with the release of a new "best of" digital store. Got a shiny new Kindle Fire for Christmas? Amazon wants you to download, download, download to your heart's content.
For Amazon, this is an "of course they would" moment. The company loses money on the hardware for the Kindle Fire and basically breaks even on other Kindle products. Amazon then must push consumers to its digital products. What better way to do so then by highlighting some of its best paid apps and expensive books?
Amazon updated the Kindle app for iOS today, giving iPad users the ability to access publications from the Kindle Newsstand. Amazon's Newsstand offers over 400 full-color publications to Kindle Fire users. Apple's own Newsstand offers more app-like experiences from many of the same publishers.
In addition to the 400 magazines and newspapers, the iPad app can also now display "print replica textbooks," which are more like giant PDFs than interactive applications. All iOS devices, not just the iPad, now support the Send-to-Kindle feature, allowing users to send documents to the device by email. They can also open PDFs from email or the browser in the Kindle app.
As part of our annual review of the Web, we single out a big Internet company that has impressed us the most over the calendar year. The first Best BigCo was chosen back in 2004, so this is the 8th year we've done this. Only four companies have won it up till now. Google has been our selection three times (2004, 2006 and 2009) and Facebook has won it twice (2007 and 2010). The only other two winners have been Apple (2008) and Yahoo (2005).
This year we're pleased to etch a fifth name onto the Best BigCo trophy (although like our own little company, the trophy is virtual). Our Best BigCo of 2011 has been around since the Dot Com era, but what's most impressive is how it has disrupted entirely new markets over the past year. Our Best BigCo for 2011 is...
The Kindle Fire has been released to great fanfare, mixed reviews and millions of devices sold. The device's growth trajectory has already outpaced that of any other tablet introduced to the market. Secondary statistics show that the growth of the Kindle Fire rivals even that of the original iPad when it was unleashed on the world in the beginning of 2010.
Advertising network Millennial Media notes in its monthly report MobileMix device index report that ad impressions on the Fire have grown at a daily rate of 19% since its launch in the middle of November. Millennial is seeing run rates of hundreds of millions of impressions from the Fire, putting it in the upper echelon of devices on the market.
The Kindle Fire is reportedly getting a software update within the next couple of weeks, according to the New York Times. It will be an over-the-air update intended to improve scrolling, poor browser performance, parental controls and security issues. According to the report, Amazon has had a plethora of user complaints on the reviews of the device and the press has been less than friendly to the Fire. The question becomes: can a software upgrade really heal what is failing in the Fire?
This was bound to happen for Amazon. The Fire is a device made on second-tier hardware trying to fork Android Gingerbread into a seven-inch form factor with a toned-down approach based off media consumption. The Fire is an ambitious project trying to work off a scaled-down approach.
Amazon really wants to attract more independent authors to its publishing platform. It also wants to add competitive muster to its Kindle Store for e-books and the new Kindle e-book lending library. In a move designed to achieve both goals, the company today announced the launch of KDP Select, a program that gives Kindle Direct Publishing authors an incentive to participate in Amazon's e-book lending initiative.
If indie authors are willing to sell their e-book exclusively through Amazon for 90 days, those books become available through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. Each time a writer's book is loaned through the system, they get a cut of revenue on top of the royalties they get from book sales.
When you're holiday shopping this year, there's little doubt that Amazon would prefer that you buy that copy of the Steve Jobs biography or Snuggie on their site, rather than in an actual store. That's why the e-commerce giant offers things like free shipping and a mobile app that lets you scan barcodes and compare prices.
In many cases, the price Amazon pulls up on its Price Check app for iOS is going to smaller than the one stuck to the item you're holding in your hand. They know this, and so to further encourage you to buy from them, Amazon is offering a 5% discount on items purchased via the Price Check app.
When it comes to viewing websites and apps on the Kindle Fire, is the experience more like that of a bigger tablet such as the iPad or a smaller smartphone? Amazon's new 10-inch tablet appears to occupy an awkward space about halfway in between, which poses new challenges to designers and developers.
While conducting tests on the Kindle Fire, website usability expert Jakob Nielsen said the 7-inch form factor was too small to comfortably browse desktop-sized sites and that in most cases, a mobile-optimized site was preferable from a user experience standpoint. Even so, those mobile-friendly sites were designed for screens much smaller than that of the Kindle Fire, so they may not take full advantage of the 7-inch screen's real estate.
As soon as Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet started shipping last month, users eagerly unboxed it, took it for a spin and started posting their reviews online. Some were enamored with the device through and through, while others expressed disappointment over its shortcomings, one of which was a slower browsing experience than expected. As compelling as they may be, what many of these first impressions lack is hard data to back them up. Until now.
Google employee and Web performance expert Steve Souders decided to put Silk through its paces and test its performance alongside other leading tablet devices. He loaded a series of 11 URL's on the Fire, iPad 1, iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab versions 7.0 and 10.1. Souders, who created the Y Slow Firefox plugin while working at Yahoo, used a tool he built called Loadtimer to test the load speeds of each site. The results confirm what many have already noticed: Silk is slow.
