Maybe Jeff Bezos does have a hit on its hands. TechCrunch notes that the sold-out Amazon Kindle is selling for up to $1,500 on eBay. Didn't these people skim Robert Scoble's review of the e-book reader? Or Walt Mossberg's slam? Both say the thing's a piece of crap. For the same $1,500 you can buy a well-equipped MacBook, or almost four iPhones. When the thing first came out, I considered buying one, but didn't think it was worth $400. I guess I was wrong. At these prices, it's practically the new Nintendo Wii.

Amazon.com and Pepsi have teamed up for a year-long free music promotion, very similar to one Apple and Pepsi had several years ago. The promotion, scheduled for a Super Bowl launch, will have consumers collecting five Pepsi bottle caps for one free music track from Amazon. In short, Amazon is making a major play against iTunes. The Super Bowl is the highest-profile advertising venue in the world, and Amazon will get tons of attention from the Pepsi promotion. For free music, plenty of people will take advantage of the promo — but will they stick around to buy music when it's finished?

Amazon has officially launched Askville, its version of Yahoo's wildly successful pageview generator Yahoo Answers. On Yahoo's site, the questions get answered through the generosity of its users. Askville will bribe users with Quest Gold, redeemable for Amazon.com gift cards (for a limited time). Google Answers, which was shuttered a year ago this week, had questioners pay to get their questions answered. Time will tell if this scheme will be able to compete or if it will fail like it did the first time. That's right: This is Askville Version 2.0. It launched last year to underwhelming response. Next time, Jeff Bezos should ask if anyone wants him to do anything besides sell books.

NBC Universal, in its ongoing effort to throw Steve Jobs into a jealous rage, is wooing every other feller with a video service in sight. In its man-harem: Jeff Bezos, with Amazon Unbox, and Jason Kilar, CEO of its joint venture with News Corp. Hulu. Add to the list Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. NBC has wooed Hastings into a syndication deal. As Apple used to do on iTunes, Netflix will offer new episodes of Heroes the day after they air, alongside a library of prior 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, and The Office shows. Looks like someone can finally stop whining about the gaping hole left by the iTunes pullout.

I know I'm not the only one thinking Amazon.com's e-book reader Kindle sounds more like kindling, something that should be burned, rather than something that ignites ideas and revolutions — a problem that a good naming myth, well told, will not easily overcome. Fortunately for Bezos, Charlie Rose can't help but interrupt his guests and provide the answers to his own questions. In an interview, the CEO fumbled through the origin of the e-book reader's name. But why is Jeff Bezos completely failing to tell the true, compelling, and literary origins of the Kindle name?

A week after launching, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal remain the bestsellers for Amazon.com's e-reader, Kindle, but Time magazine has dramatically fallen to 12th place and continues to fall. Why? The display technology, eInk, is better than traditional displays at approximating the experience of text on a page, but the high-contrast, monochromatic screen is lousy at displaying images. The Kindle version of Time omits the images because of this, and Time magazine's appeal is as much in pictures as in words.

Currently, the top three bestselling titles for Amazon.com's Kindle, Jeff Bezos's tree-killer killer, are newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Despite the fear that newspapers and magazines are dying, they are the most popular purchase on the future's book killer. These traditional publications are all available online, mostly for free. Kindle purchasers, in other words are spendthrift, hyperliterate gadget junkies who feel guilty about both the environment and the demise of old media. Who besides Craig Newmark is buying this thing? I can't wait to I buy a $20 Kindle on eBay — a past reminder of a failed future.

Somebody bleach Saul Hansell's hair and hand him some eyeliner. He wants you to LEAVE JEFF BEZOS ALONE! After Amazon.com shoppers and a few gadget reviewers slammed Bezos's latest pet project, the Kindle e-reader, the New York Times reporter has blogged "In Defense of Kindle." His main point is that the Kindle is a version 1.0 product which will improve over time. A touchscreen, for example, would improve the user interface. Hansell argues that some of Kindle's "missing" features — color, email, and ads — would make the device better, not worse. Yesterday, you saw our side-by-side comparison of the Kindle versus its nearest competitor, the book. Now it's time for you take sides in our latest Valleywag poll. Bonus points for anyone who composes a video response on YouTube in proper style.

Click to viewClick to view

Egoblogger Robert Scoble takes the video show on the road again. Fortunately, he isn't risking other lives while driving. This time, he's merely walking around his neighborhood, showing off his new gadget — Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader — while he films and talks to himself. Why? I have no clue. Maybe Robert simply enjoys walking into things blindly. Maybe he knows his audience is most likely to view his videos if there is a chance he may walk into oncoming traffic.

Amazon.com CEO and firestarter Jeff Bezos sat down to Charlie Rose's table last night. There, Bezos predicted Amazon's new e-reader Kindle will in the near future lead to new forms of art — like serial novels! — and render books made from "dead trees" as relics for "cabinets of curiosity." Bezos also gets in a characteristic maniacal laugh or two. Rose impersonates a tree.

Rob Beschizza over at Gadget Lab made an important observation about Amazon's new electronic book reader: It's terrible. At least 38 percent of customer reviews on Amazon.com douse the Kindle with a 1-star rating. Perhaps Jeff Bezos should consider adopting Apple's old policy of automatically assigning top ratings to its own products.

Today, Amazon told the world about Kindle, a "wireless portable reading device with instant access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers." We're guessing it's called "Kindle" because soon all books will have to be burned, as we will no longer know how to interface with them without our wireless readers!

Amazon.com topper Jeff Bezos possesses an estimated personal wealth of $9 billion. He's come a long way, too. Born to a teenage mother and a disappearing dad, Bezos also survived the dotcom bust. But according to a weekend profile in the Times, all the success has gone straight to Bezos's head and exploded it. The man is nuts. As in, he's trying to monetize space travel.

Last week I bitched wrote about a delayed order for the new Fake Steve Jobs book, Options, from Amazon.com. An email from the online store told me that the book, out today at a Borders near you, had been rescheduled for a December shipment. I emailed CEO Jeff Bezos with my sob story and got a very apologetic email from Executive Customer Relations. I now know that my "experience with this order has been unordinary and not truly representative of the quality of service we offer." Well, that's a relief. Maybe I'll get free overnight shipping. Until then, I'll have to be happy with excerpts. The full email after the jump.

One almost thinks Jeff Bezos has come out with a one-click way for patenting everything on the Internet. With his beloved One-Click patent in tatters, Bezos got a consolation prize from the Patent Office. Patent No. 7,287,042 was issued today for a "Search engine system supporting inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL". In other words, Amazon just patented something Google has been doing for years. (Photo by AP/Andy Rogers)

Being an intrepid tech reporter, I buy books related to my work. I just picked up The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media (obligatory: it is the greatest work ever put to print. You should buy copies for yourself and all your friends). I preordered Options by Forbes editor Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, way back in July. I've been pantingly awaiting the arrival of my copy from Amazon.com. A few days ago, I got an email from Amazon saying my book arrival date was getting pushed back — to December 14. I thought it was just a mixup, but now we've heard from other sources that Amazon sent them the same email. What's going on? Here's what Fake Steve himself has to say about it.

Updated. MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte has insisted that his One Laptop Per Child program is a charity that will only sell its wares to governments of developing nations. So who convinced him it was okay to sell the device to consumers in the United States and Canada at twice the price? Why, Negroponte pal Jeff Bezos, who knows a little bit about selling and marketing. Not only did the Amazon.com founder convince the philanthropist to turn his charity into a business, he convinced him that the best way to market the cute laptops was to turn them into a status symbol for the wealthy elite — a symbol on the order of Lance Armstrong's iconic yellow Livestrong bracelets, which is where Bezos really got the idea.

FANTASY M&A —The buzz is all about Microsoft, or possibly Google, taking a stake in Facebook, the popular social network, at a lofty valuation as high as $15 billion. But the logic of those deals is driven by advertising — the more targeted, the better. But what, exactly, are advertisers hoping to target, and why? Besides crude demographics and geographies, the most logical hooks for ads are Facebook users' expressed preferences — the books, music, and movies they're increasingly listing on their profiles. And who has the best data on what consumers will buy? Why, Amazon.com, of course. The logic of a combination — a merger of the two giant databases of consumer preferences is, at least on the surface, compelling.

For an hourly rate (PDF) of $245-$465+ per hour, most people would be champing at the bit to start work at 6 o' clock in the morning. Not the high-powered but sleep-deprived attorneys of Fenwick & West, however. They'redefending Amazon's 1-Click patent, which covers Amazon's vaunted click-and-buy ordering process. Not only are Amazon's San Francisco-based attorneys unwilling to travel to D.C. for a September 13 hearing they requested, they've asked the Patent and Trademark Office to move the hearing time from 9 a.m. Eastern to 1 p.m., lest they be forced to endure what a Fenwick & West partner characterized as the "undue hardship" of being ready at 6 a.m. Pacific Time. Just another way Amazon's making good on CEO Jeff Bezos's pledge of making "less work for the overworked Patent and Trademark Office."

Indiana University's decision to partner with "human-powered" search engine ChaCha shouldn't have been controversial. ChaCha's based in Indiana and was founded by two IU alumni. Universities often have ties to local startups. Did anyone question Stanford's use of Google, or a professor's investment in the company? No, the controversy comes because no one actually believes that ChaCha is a better search engine than Google, and, more importantly, the partnership conscripts the university's library and IT staff into working for the search engine for free. And it's always the coverup, never the cime. In attempting to downplay university president Michael McRobbie's ties to ChaCha, university officials made the situation much, much worse. Someone's lying. It's just a question of to whom, and when.