Amazon.com

Ten years ago this month, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime to the world. "It's simple," he wrote in a letter posted to Amazon.com. "For a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free." It's funny to look back and see how Bezos baked a little marketing sleight-of-hand right into the product launch-the shipping is not really free, after all, if you're paying a fee. But one piece of what Bezos promised has held true for the past decade: For customers, Prime turns out to be dead simple.

I've been an author for more than fifteen years. My first book came out with HarperCollins in February 2000 and I've been going ever since. (I'm British and the book came out in the UK and elsewhere, though I'm a relative newbie in the US.) Fifteen years might not sound such a long time, but I've already had two literary agents, four publishers, seven editors, and thirteen books-even more if you include things I've worked on as editor or ghost. More to the point, I've witnessed the publishing industry evolve through

Jet.com, a soon-to-start online marketplace that aims to loosen Amazon's grip on e-commerce, said Wednesday that it had raised $140 million in a new round of funding.

The investment, led by Bain Capital Ventures, values the company at almost $600 million, according to people briefed on the funding round - an unusually high valuation for a start-up that has not yet opened for business.

Other venture capital investors, including Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Goldman Sachs and Google Ventures, also participated in the funding, which follows earlier investment rounds totaling $80 million.

Amazon has launched its Kindle Unlimited subscription ebook service in Canada and Mexico, its eighth and ninth market respectively.

Today's news comes more than six months after the service first launched in the U.S., and a little over four months after it landed in the U.K.

For CDN$9.99 ($8 USD) or 129 pesos ($8.60 USD), subscribers can access 750,000 ebooks, though it's worth noting that you won't be able to access all the latest bestsellers - many of them are self-published titles created through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Got books to digitize and plenty of patience? Amazon's Kindle Convert software will let you scan them at home.

As spotted by The Ebook Reader, Kindle Convert is a $50 PC application that turns printed pages into Kindle e-books. It should work with most scanners, provided they support at least 300 dpi, 8-bit depth for greyscale, and 24-bit depth for color.

The software includes automatic alignment and text editing capabilities, but also preserves the book's original font and formatting, along with any handwritten notes, autographs and images.

The e-commerce giant has inked deals with three major universities to run websites selling all sorts of college students' delectables, including textbooks, college-themed apparel and ramen noodles, the Wall Street Journal reports. Students at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Davis can use the new co-branded website to place orders.

The campus initiative gives unlimited next-day on-campus delivery to Amazon Student Prime members (quicker than the two-day delivery for regular Amazon Prime customers). Also as a part of the deal

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. Chances are you do, too.

I used to feel pretty good about the e-tailer. Now, increasingly, I feel a little dirty every time I patronize it. For one thing, its nearly yearlong price-setting war with Hachette -- which quietly wrapped up in December with Amazon more or less folding and allowing the book publisher to determine its own e-book prices -- still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

We often think of digital textbooks as being read on iPads, and Apple rolled out iBooks Author, which lets users create textbooks and other interactive ebooks, in 2012. But Amazon, not surprisingly, wants in on the self-published textbook action, and on Thursday launched Kindle Textbook Creator, a beta tool that lets users convert graphics-heavy PDFs into ebooks.

Authors can also add highlighting, flashcards and some other features to the books. Textbook Creator is available for free download on Mac or Windows here.

January is often a time of recaps and predictions, and the book industry is no exception to this trend. We've already shared in our December issue the big ideas we think will impact the publishing industry in 2015, so it seems only fitting that we take a look backwards as well. Book Business brings you the top 5 most popular articles of 2014.

In light of Amazon’s growing dominance in the book market and its recent and very public negotiations with Big 5 publisher Hachette, Intelligence Squared -- a global forum for debate -- hosted a live stream event on Thursday, January 15, 2015, asking four panelists to support or reject the statement, “Amazon Is the Reader’s Friend.”