ReadWriteWeb

There are some conflicting stories coming out the BookExpo America today about Google's plans for Google Books: one story speculating that Google may be planning an e-book rental service and another speculating that Google may be closing its e-bookstore.

The shuttering of the e-bookstore was something that Melville House Publishing wrote about today, contending that publishers are finding it difficult to get started in the bookstore and that Google has pulled its developers from the project. When ReadWriteWeb asked Google to comment, the company responded, "We refuse to comment on rumor and speculation," pointing to a blog post from Monday touting some of the successes from the first 6 months of the Google Books program: three million free Google eBooks and 250 independent booksellers selling them, for example.

But more interesting - although difficult to say if more plausible - is the possibility of an e-book rental service.

The battle for control of the e-reader market continues with the announcement by Amazon that it will be offering a Kindle 3G with Special Offers, starting immediately. Amazon introduced its first Kindle with Special Offers last month, offering customers a lower priced Wi-Fi-only Kindle.

Those "special offers" include advertising and while some people (myself included) balked at the idea of ads in an e-reader, this cheaper version of the Kindle was wildly popular, quickly becoming the bestselling version in the Kindle family. So now Amazon is making a similarly discounted device available for the 3G version.

Kindle e-book lending service Lendle has added an interesting new feature to its service today: the ability for users to earn a little money when they lend their e-books via the site.

Most users will be credited $.50 for every e-book lent, and patrons - those who've supported the site with a one-time $25 donation - will get $1.00 for every e-book lent. Every time users rack up $10 in credits, they'll receive a $10 Amazon gift card.

Seattle-based gamemaker PopCap Games announced today that it has struck a deal with Amazon to offer its next two Android games - Chuzzle and Plants vs Zombies - exclusively via the Amazon Appstore.

Chuzzle goes on sale beginning tomorrow and Plants vs Zombies for Android will be available later in the month. The games will be free for the first day of their release, after which they'll be available to purchase for $2.99 each.

The Amazon Appstore's exclusivity will only last two weeks, after which time the games will be available elsewhere, presumably via the Android Market.

There is an elephant at the door of the Android ecosystem. Nobody quite wants to look at it or acknowledge the whispers, but Amazon may be set to become the leader in Android devices later this year.

Officially, Amazon has said nothing about creating its own Android devices. There has been talk of a tablet in the works for a while now but its specs and ship date is shrouded in mystery. But Amazon may have bigger ambitions than just a tablet. Rumors have come out today that not only is the online retail company looking at a slate, but an entire family of Android devices. If this happens, will the waves topple the balance of power of players in the Android ecosystem?

Google is finally launching its Google Music service at this week's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, a year after its reveal at the last event. The new service will be similar to what Amazon launched in March, an online storage locker where your songs will be stored in the "cloud." In this case, the "cloud" refers to Google's servers. Once your music is uploaded, you can stream it to your Android-powered mobile phone or via the Web to your computer.

While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.

Almost as galling as the Amazon Web Services outage itself is a the litany of blog posts, such as this one and this one, that place the blame not on AWS for having a long failure and not communicating with its customers about it, but on AWS customers for not being better prepared for an outage. It's a tendency that displays a "blame the customer" mentality I've been seeing a lot lately. To understand why it's wrong one has to understand what actually happened and what claims AWS made about it services.

We covered the differences between availability zones and availability regions, and AWS' lack of communication, in our previous coverage. Now that the dust has settled, it's worth looking back at what happened. This timeline by Eric Kidd explains the series of events, and the various options different customers had. RightScale provides another good summary. What can we learn?

According to Peter Rojas, former co-founer of Engadget and now co-founder of gdgt, the highly anticipated Amazon Android tablet may be coming from Samsung. Citing only "sources within the industry," Rojas claims he's "99% certain" that Amazon is having Samsung build its tablet computer for them and it's expected to arrive no later than this summer.

He also speculates about the possibility of the tablet running Android 3.0 Honeycomb (or not), as well as what type of content Amazon plans to sell on it. (Hint: more than apps!)

Amazon EC2 is down on the East Coast and it is interrupting service to major consumer sites and platforms such as Heroku.

The service issues have led to outages at popular sites such as Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and Hootsuite. Heroku has a status page for customers about the problem. The platform relies on Amazon EC2 to serve its developer community and the associated services that use it.

Last week, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) issued a warning to mobile app developers regarding Amazon's recently launched Appstore for Android. The message, simply put: don't use it. According to the letter posted here on the IGDA website, the organization had "significant concerns" about the distribution terms, pricing policies and discounting practices Amazon used when selling developers' apps.

But after a clarification from Amazon which said the IGDA had referenced an older version of the developer agreement by mistake, many wrote off the whole situation as a simple "misunderstanding." But that's not the case, the IGDA now claims. "Amazon's terms, as they currently stand, represent a threat to game developers," reads the latest blog post from the organization.