Microsoft Corp.

If you want to see the future of Amazon in education, don't look to Seattle. Look to Sao Paulo.

For months, I've wondered what Amazon's strategy for the Kindle in education might be. Amazon's presence in the K-12 school market has been notable largely by its absence. No grand, sweeping announcements. No blow-out presentations at education technology conferences. No dramatic Bezos schoolyard laughs.

Barnes & Noble Inc. ( BKS ) and Microsoft Corp. ( MSFT ) have agreed to revise their partnership, allowing the bookseller to stop developing an app for its Nook e-reader that would work on Windows 8 devices or a Windows Phone.

Instead, the maker of the Nook will provide reading content for Microsoft's new consumer reader platform.

Barnes & Noble's filing with the SEC for the third quarter of fiscal 2014 shows how dramatically the company is scaling back its Nook operations. During the period ended January 25, 2014, Nook capital expenditures were $7.4 million, a decline of 74% from the money spent on the group in the comparable period in fiscal 2013. For the first nine months of fiscal 2014, Nook capital expenditures were reduced 55%. The filing repeated what company executives said in the conference call last week that since

The founders of Inkshares don’t think the traditional publishing industry is broken, just antiquated and inefficient — and they think marrying crowdfunding and the kinds of services publishers used to offer makes for a pretty compelling service for writers and ultimately for readers as well

Ebook and literacy nonprofit Worldreader is partnering with the UN Refugee Agency on a pilot program to give Kindle Paperwhites to 2,300 secondary school students in African refugee camps.

Recently my friend Mike Shatzkin asked me to participate in a panel on Amazon at Digital Book World. Mike asked all the panelists a question that I want to attempt to answer at greater length than I was able to at the conference. The question was in two parts:  first, how much more market share can Amazon amass before it slows down or is stopped? Second, who can put together a meaningful merchandising service that could take share from Amazon?

There's an old saying about a new year and a new beginning,  and Barnes & Noble is taking it to an extreme. Over the past few weeks no fewer than 4 members of the senior management at Nook Media, B&N's ebook sub, have either left the company, been promoted, or announced that they have one foot out the door.

The first to go was Michael Huseby. Barnes & Noble announced on 8 January that Huseby was leaving his position as head of Nook Media to take the CEO position at Barnes & Noble.

Diana Dawson has over the years bought her twin children digital cameras, e-book readers and media players as Christmas presents. This holiday season, she's covering those bases with one device: a tablet computer.

"They do it all," Dawson said outside an Apple Inc. store in Walnut Creek, California, after buying iPads for her now 27-year-old daughters.

Dawson’s purchasing underscores the changes roiling the consumer-electronics market. While the industry once benefited from year-end sales in categories from cameras to printers to desktop personal computers, this holiday period brings the clearest signs yet that

"Compelling ideas expressed at their natural length." That's Amazon's tagline for their popular Kindle Singles program. And while Singles hasn't exactly been a major industry disruptor I believe it lays the foundation for some of the bigger, bolder initiatives Amazon is planning for the future. I also believe it's a model that will become much more common over time.

Although light on details, Microsoft engineers revealed that offering Windows users the ability to buy e-books and to subscribe to digital publications via their Microsoft accounts, rather than having to rely on services from companies like Amazon, is "definitely on the radar and something we're working on!"