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According to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos, "millions of people now own Kindles." Sadly, Amazon has always kept the exact number of Kindle sales under wraps. According to some analysts, consumers in the US bought roughly 3 million e-readers in 2009 and the majority of these were probably Kindles. Amazon also doesn't release any data about how many e-books it sells. In a press release that accompanied the company's Q4 earnings report, however, Amazon yesterday announced that it now sells six Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both editions are available.

Amazon quietly made a major change to its Digital Text Platform last week that went largely unnoticed: Small publishers and individual authors who use the Digital Text Platform can now opt out of the Kindle's digital rights management (DRM) program. While this change only affects a relatively small number of publishers and authors for now, this move could hint at a larger change in Amazon's DRM policy. Right now, Amazon's DRM policy means that its customers can't transfer their books to a non-Kindle e-reader.

Amazon just announced that it is now offering publishers and authors a new 70% royalty option. Publishers and authors who choose this option will receive 70% of the list price from sales of their e-books in the Kindle store. In order to qualify for this option, publishers have to turn on the text-to-speech feature and make the e-book available in all locations for which the author or publisher has rights. In addition, publishers also have to sell the e-book for at least 20% below the price of the physical book and can't charge more than $9.99 for the Kindle edition.

Copia, a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia's e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers, as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books.

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

A hypothetical discussion between a cloud consultant and his client that is just too good not to post. Just be forewarned - this is NSFW.

In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let's find out...

As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion's share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy - and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we look at current statistics for online retail.

Amazon just released a free e-book reader application for Windows PCs. The Kindle for PC application allows Amazon customers to read Kindle books on their Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines. A Mac version will follow soon. The application was clearly designed to work on a wide variety of computers and works especially well on netbooks and touchscreen devices. Besides being capable of working with Amazon's proprietary e-book format, the app can also display e-books in the .mobi file format.

Last night, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. By clicking on the "Share with Twitter" button from any Amazon product details page, members are delivered to the Twitter.com website. Here, a shortened link and a bit of auto-populated text are automatically filled in Twitter's "What are you doing?" text box. The included text can be edited to say whatever they want before posting or they can choose to just post as is. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.

Online retailer Amazon.com has just announced a new checkout system called "PayPhrase" which speeds up the process of making online purchases by allowing shoppers to enter a unique phrase and 4-digit PIN number to complete their transaction. Both the phrase and PIN are created in advance and are linked to a shipping address and preferred method of payment. After the initial set up, PayPhrase users are no longer required to sign in or fill out credit card information when shopping online.

There can be little doubt that eBook and eReaders are having a breakout year. Today, Forrester Research moved its original projection of 2 million US eReader sales in 2009 up 50%. Forrester now expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 and that 30% of these will sell during the holiday season. Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps argues that sales are growing much faster than expected because of falling prices, better retail distribution, and the media buzz that currently surrounds eBooks and eReaders. For 2010, Forrester projects eReader sales of up to 10 million.

Today, Amazon launched a new service which brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Called the "Amazon Mobile Payments Service," the technology includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) for mobile developers which will allow them to provide payment options to their customers within mobile websites and mobile applications. The new service also allows for integration of Amazon's "1-Click" checkout, the feature that lets customers make purchases using their credit card information stored within their Amazon.com accounts.

When Barnes & Noble launched its eBook store, it immediately attracted a lot of potential customers. According to Compete's Dillon McGovern, more than four times as many people visited the eBook section on B&N's website than the Amazon Kindle store during the first week after the launch in July. After just about a month, though, these numbers returned to normality and today Amazon once again leads the pack by a very wide margin. While B&N was able to attract a lot of interest in its new eBook offerings, it was clearly hurt by the fact that it didn't offer users a hardware eReader yet.

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Paul McCartney's whooping encouragement, Lennon's calm breaths and Harrison's pensive plucking - if you're a Fab Four fan, you already know that tomorrow marks the official launch of the Beatle's remastered catalogue. But to further fan the flames of excitement, Yoko Ono spilled the beans that the discography will also finally appear in the iTunes store. According to 9 to 5 Mac, Ono told Sky News that the entire Beatles back catalogue will be available for download in conjunction with tomorrow's Apple event. While the post has since been removed, Twitter has been a aflutter with rumors. The long awaited event will also happen with the release of The Beatles: Rockband.

When Radiohead keyboardist / guitarist Jonny Greenwood shrugs off the issue of audio fidelity, indie musicians should take note. Given that Radiohead is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of alternative music monetization, it's ironic that Greenwood is discrediting one of the industry's key price differentiators. Musicians with tracks on iTunes, Amazon and DIY stores like Bandcamp have often chosen to price MP3s at lower rates while higher quality recordings have fetched more per track. In a recent article with The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Greenwood admits there is little reason for the MP3 generation to look for a higher quality experience.

Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of the world's second largest book publisher, Hachette Livre, says that the current pricing trends for eBooks may soon kill the hardcover book as we know it. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nourry says that he worries that the combination of the $9.99 price for bestsellers and the fact that Google now offers millions of out-of-copyright books for free could destroy profits for traditional publishing houses. Nourry is especially worried about the fact that Amazon is currently selling eBooks at a loss and that the company will soon demand that publishers will lower their prices so that it can actually make a profit from selling eBooks in its Kindle store.

Hardly a day went by this week without a major new announcement in the eBook and eReader arena. The wireless eReaders from Sony and the Irex/Barnes & Noble partnership were probably some of the most interesting announcements. In addition, Google also opened up its EPUB archive, which will give readers easy access to over 1 million free public-domain books for their eReaders. The only company that didn't have anything to announce this week was Amazon, which is now in danger of losing its early lead to Sony and Barnes & Noble.