Todd Sampson has a great take on publisher’s reaction to the text-to-speech feature on the new Amazon Kindle. Rather than view this feature as a threat to their existing Books on Tape business line, they should look at Amazon’s electronic distribution of their text as a potential channel for an upsell.
The quality of the voice [...]
Is this for real? Amazon has it listed in stock and ready to ship. Thankfully we can count on the Amazon reviewing public to bring out the snarky truth.
Some choice excerpts:
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state [...]
Tivo and Amazon have teamed up in a partnership that anyone following the two could have seen coming. It will soon be possible to click your Tivo remote and order items like the latest album from the musical guest on the David Letterman show.
The concept of using your remote to purchase stuff you see on [...]
I love how Amazon remembers books that I’ve purchased from them a long time ago and offers up recommendations from time to time of other books that I might be interested in also reading. Usually they’re pretty relevant (except for when I purchased a large print book on Frank Sinatra’s life and then got on [...]
Fully 70 percent of the effort required to do business online involves doing the heavy lifting that supports Web-scale applications, he said. After a decade of training, Amazon got really good at pumping iron, and now you can hire its muscle to do some heavy lifting for you.
- Jon Udell on Amazon’s new web [...]
Via Paul Bausch is news of a feature in Amazon.com that runs analysis on books scanned into Amazon’s Search Inside index. From Amazon’s site:
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the
interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of
books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all
books in [...]
I would be remiss if I didn’t pile on to the hubub about Amazon’s new Yellow Pages search over on the A9 site. John Battelle’s got the scoop on how it was put together.
In short, Manber and co. (urged on by Jeff Bezos, who Manber says was "very involved") strapped GPS-enabled digital video camera-cum-terabyte server [...]
Today we launched a new sidebar widget which pulls in your Amazon wishlist and displays thumbnail images from the items into a graphic which you can put into your sidebar.
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The creepy tone of the background music sets the stage for this look back at the demise of traditional media as we know it from the perspective of 2014. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Friendster and the trend towards personalized and automated filters to help manage information flow pull down the Fourth Estate.
“The New York Times becomes [...]
