One benefit of eBooks is that you can purchase and read them anoynmously—there are no nosy clerks or shaming book covers to give away your terrible taste. This, as it turns out, is great news for Hitler's sales: the electronic version of Mein Kampf has become a surprise bestseller over the past year.
Interested in celebrity dick size? Boy, do I have the book for you: Celebrities with Big Dicks like Jay-Z, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Many More, edited by one Dana Rasmussen. It's out of stock right now on Amazon—I bought the last copy—but you can order one of three used copies available, starting at the low price of $37.73 (plus shipping).
It's hot in Japan, and finally coming to the U.S.: For $2 or $3 per title, you can have your book collection lovingly scanned, emailed, and ground into dust. You don't even have to dispose of the corpse. Progress!
Terminal patients often suffer colorful delusions. But none is as cruel as the fantasy Amazon.com has kindled among dying ink-stained wretches, who believe a magical electronic reading device will cure what ails magazines and newspapers.
Dear media companies: Please stop trying to innovate. You're lousy at it. Hearst's supposed "Kindle killer," an electronic reader for magazines, is just the latest in a series of debacles from the moribund print-media business.
After a TechCrunch report said that Amazon.com had already sold 240,000 Kindles this year, Wall Street analyst Mark Mahaney called the Kindle "the iPod of the book world." Now Amazon.com says both Mahaney and TechCrunch spoke too soon and without talking to the right people. The right people, according to analysts from McAdams Wright Ragen, being analysts from McAdams Wright Ragen.They say Amazon executives told them "high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable." Writes one of the McAdams Wright Ragen analysts: " told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by company. Since we've never seen a Kindle in person, we're inclined to believe the Amazon executives when they say the Kindle isn't quite such a huge hit. But the suits might also be trying to keep expectations low enough to be easily surpassed.
If you didn't buy Amazon,com's e-book reader — shown above in a CNET video — you're far, far from alone. A CrunchGear rumor report says Amazon will try again for this year's holiday shopping season. Kindle 2.0, says "an insider," will be bigger, less fussy to use, and thank God Almighty they're going to get rid of the original model's retro 1983 IBM PC sickly off-white plastic case color. Even Zune Brown would be an improvement. The key points from CrunchGear's report:
For the makers of e-book readers, the raincoater audience — the straightish men who frequent adult bookstores for the promise of a little action in the back — are an unlikely market. They're not even there to read, for starters. But for literate smut fans, who have been choosing Amazon.com from the first day they made erotic books available in discreet, brown-wrapped boxes? If they're turning to the Kindle to deliver their porn, Amazon's not telling. Not entirely. We've got numbers on how well the same books sell in print, but not for their Kindle counterparts. Better figures might be possible if everyone's who's spindled their Kindle dropped Amazon a line.
In case you missed their guest appearance on Today, Jenna and Laura Bush have collaborated with an illustrator on Read All About It!, the $17.99, 32-page tale of math machine and science whiz Tyrone, a reluctant reader until the books that his teacher read to the class actually came to life. All five-star reviews so far, with the exception of one Zebo Quad, who opines: "This book just proves that celebrities could vomit onto a blank page and publishers would publish it." It also suggests Steve Jobs was onto something when he dissed the Amazon Kindle e-book reader:
Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president, and more.
Silicon Alley Insider blogger Peter Kafka thinks e-books are doomed — even a monolith like Amazon.com won't spark excitement with its new Kindle reader, he argues. The problem, as he points out, is that there's nothing wrong with how consumers read books. Adopting e-book readers would force everyone to change their consumption habits — a big step that even something the iPod didn't require. [Silicon Alley Insider]
Book publishers will face the same disruption with electronic book readers as the music industry did with the iPod, says The New York Times. Amazon is prepping an October unveiling of its e-book reader, The Kindle, which will wirelessly sync with its e-book store. Later this fall, Google plans to charge for access to books scanned into its database. [The New York Times]
