
Amazon.com

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — December 12, 2016 — You can order a pizza, get a car-service pick up, hear the score of your favorite team’s game, listen to your favorite music — all with a little help from “Alexa.” Amazon’s built in “intelligent assistant” is summoned by millions of American households who own the Amazon Echo,…
Amazon quietly began selling books in its brick-and-mortar Seattle store, Amazon Books, at list price early this fall. When the store opened last November, all books were sold at Amazon.com’s prices–often significantly less than the publisher-set list prices. With Amazon’s recent phase-out of list prices site-wide, the discrepancy is likely to continue. And after years…
Pottermore, the digital content company for J K Rowling's Harry Potter books, returned to growth in its last financial year after the firm’s decision to make its ebooks and audiobooks available via Amazon, Apple, Audible and others “really paid off”. In the year to end-March 2016, sales more than doubled to £15.1m, compared to £7m…
Excitement of this kind is quite rare in the publishing industry. The last came a few years ago when Random House took over Penguin. And now this Amazon buyout of Westland has given the industry an interesting conversation beginner. Amazon had signaled their intent in February this year when they acquired minority stake in Westland…
Where have the ereader fetishists gone? I mean, they’re out there, usually drooling over the latest model updates (guilty). But where are the resulting think-pieces about the continuously changing nature of reading as we know it? If Barnes & Noble updates its Nook, the resulting press amounts to, “It’s waterproof now, if you care about…
Amazon has designed a new app that it hopes will entice children to read more. Called Rapids, this technology presents interactive stories and colorful illustrations in a style that looks like the characters are texting each other in a thread. Readers can view the messages as the story is being told or scroll through the…
Cashiers at Amazon’s physical bookstores now ask each customer the same question: Are you a Prime member? That’s because Amazon recently implemented a new pricing structure at its bookstores that could signal a broader strategy for the company’s brick-and-mortar retail expansion. At the Amazon bookstore in Seattle’s University Village, Prime members who pay $99 for an annual membership…
Amazon’s nascent plan to open physical bookstores is an experiment going well so far, according to Andy Jassy, who heads the company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services. “It’s an experiment for us, something we think could be very useful,” said Jassy, while speaking at the Wall Street Journal D Live conference on Tuesday. “So far,…
Just before the morning rush hour on a recent Thursday, a brigade of vans rolled up to a low-slung warehouse near Los Angeles International Airport. Workers in bright green vests crammed some 150 Amazon.com packages into each truck before the fleet headed through the urban sprawl to customers’ doorsteps. This logistical dance wasn’t performed by…
Emma Moore could have been the health and weight loss guru you spent your life looking for. You might be forgiven for not knowing her work -- after all, she has a common name, one that she shares with other similarly successful authors on Amazon. Until this week, she had dozens of health, dieting, cooking,…