Does Amazon Want to Monopolize The Entire Publishing Chain?

from the how-much-is-enough? dept

The launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire at a price well below expectations has naturally focused people's attention on the e-book side of Amazon's operations, and the likely effect of the extended Kindle family on other publishers trying to go digital. But something else is happening at the other end of the publishing chain that could well disrupt the industry just as much, if not more: Amazon is becoming a major publisher in its own right.

Things began back in May 2009, when it launched AmazonEncore:

a new program whereby Amazon uses information such as customer reviews on Amazon websites to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors that show potential for greater sales.

After this low-key start, Amazon added others imprints, including AmazonCrossing (foreign books in translation), Powered by Amazon (short books), Montlake Romance (romantic fiction), Thomas & Mercer (mysteries and thrillers) and, most recently, 47North (science fiction, fantasy and horror) - the last of these with some eye-catching authors:

47North launches with 15 books, including "The Mongoliad: Book One," the first in the ambitious, five-book, collaborative Foreworld series led by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. All of these books will be available to English readers in Kindle, print and audio formats at http://www.amazon.com, as well as at national and independent booksellers. 47North will publish original and previously published works, as well as out-of-print books.

Meanwhile, back in May this year, Amazon hired a publishing industry veteran to become VP, Publisher of Amazon Publishing’s New York office:

Amazon.com has taken its most aggressive step yet toward competing head-on with traditional publishers: It’s hired Larry Kirshbaum, a literary agent and the former CEO of Time Warner Publishing Group (now Hachette Book Group), to start a general trade imprint.

Until now, Amazon’s imprints have focused on genre fiction like mystery and romance. By hiring a high-profile industry veteran to focus on “quality books in literary and commercial fiction, business and general nonfiction”—and by releasing those books in both print and digital formats—Amazon is announcing itself as a serious competitor against the “big six” traditional trade publishing houses.

Put all these imprints together, plus Amazon's main sales sites around the world and the Kindle e-readers range, and you have a fully-integrated global publishing strategy.

It's hard to see how traditional publishers can respond. They may have impressive back catalogs, and established links with leading authors, but Amazon has the distribution network and growing success in e-book publishing. Above all, the trade publishing houses seem to lack Amazon's ambition: it looks like it doesn't just want to make money from the entire publishing chain, it wants be the entire publishing chain.

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Filed Under: ebooks, economics, publishing
Companies: amazon

That Didn't Take Long: Amazon Sued For Patent Infringement For New Kindle Fire Tablet

from the up-in-flames dept

The general rule continues to prove itself true: do anything interesting in the tech world, and you will get sued for patent infringement. Just weeks after Amazon announced its new Kindle Fire tablet, the company has been sued for patent infringement by well-known patent troll Smartphone Technologies, a subsidiary of patent trolling giant Acacia. Just a few months ago we noted that Smartphone Technologies/Acacia was buying up more smartphone related patents, as it looks to seriously cash in on anyone actually doing anything in the space.

The patents in question:

• 6,956,562: Method for controlling a handheld computer by entering commands onto a displayed feature of the handheld computer (originally a PalmSource patent)
• 6,466,236: System and method for displaying and manipulating multiple calendars on a personal digital assistant (originally a Palm Inc. patent)
• 6,950,645: Power-conserving intuitive device discovery technique in a bluetooth environment (originally a PalmSource patent)
• 7,506,064: Handheld computer system that attempts to establish an alternative network link upon failing to establish a requested network link (another PalmSource patent).
• RE40,459: Method and apparatus for communicating information over low bandwidth communications networks (and, yet again, PalmSource)

So Palm may be dead and buried inside HP... but at least we know its patent legacy lives on in making products people want more expensive and less able to come to market.

Filed Under: infringement, kindle, patents
Companies: acacia, amazon, palm, smartphone technologies

Barnes & Noble Doesn't Get Digital DC Comics, Throws Hissy Fit

from the cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face dept

In a move that screams of a complete disconnect from reality, Barnes & Noble (B&N) has decided to remove over 100 DC comics from its shelves. This move is in reaction to DC giving Amazon exclusive e-publishing rights to the digital versions of those comics.

In a statement to CNN, Jaime Carey, B&N's chief merchant, said:

Regardless of the publisher, we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format. To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms and not have the e-book available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime.

Read that again. Since B&N did not get the rights to the digital version of the comics, it will be denying customers access to the physical comics. How exactly does this fulfill the promise of providing DC comics "anywhere, anytime"? How are comic fans who frequent B&N supposed to get these comics if the comics are not available in-store? This move certainly flies in the face of that promise.

With this move, B&N is hoping to 'punish' DC with fewer sales. In reality, this will only tick off its comic loving customers who will have to go to another store in order to buy these comics. While this move will probably make B&N feel better, it will not result in any real change to its partnership with DC. This is yet another company putting its own interests ahead of the interests of its customers. Much like those other businesses, this is going to bite them in the butt and they will end up backtracking soon.

Filed Under: comics, ebooks
Companies: amazon, barnes & noble, dc comics

Amazon's Silk Browser To Be A Data Mining Jackpot

from the is-there-an-encryption-app? dept

We've already discussed whether Amazon's Kindle Fire 'Silk' browser is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, for the way it apparently is going to cache and modify content from its own AWS servers. It seems that people are realizing some other potential issues with it as well. Keith Dawson points us to a couple of interesting stories looking at the data mining implications. The first, by Chris Espinosa, summarizes the issue succinctly:

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

So there's that. Of course, there are a few caveats here. In theory, your ISP could have much of the same info -- though you can get around it with encryption. Furthermore, your ISP isn't caching everything, so there are some limitations there. Of course, on the flip side, the Silk browser is only on the Kindle Fire, meaning Amazon is only getting such data based on what people surf over that particular tablet device and its 7-inch screen. It might be interesting to see some data here, but I'd bet the sort of browsing done on such a device is not representative of how people surf the wider web.

Of course, things could get more interesting if Amazon decides to enter the browser wars in a bigger way... such as by releasing Silk as a desktop browser as well. That theory is posited in another article highlighted by Dawson, this one by Joe Brockmeier, which delves deeply into the implications of the Silk browser on a variety of fronts. He's the first person I've seen bring up the idea of Amazon entering the larger desktop browser wars:

But does it seem likely that Amazon will put that much emphasis on Silk just for the Fire? I don't think that's likely. Amazon has several jobs posted for Silk engineers, and while mobile is mentioned, it's not exclusive. I strongly suspect that Amazon is going to be releasing a Silk desktop browser eventually. Probably not in the near future – Amazon needs to make sure that its infrastructure can handle the onslaught of all the Kindle users before trying to scale to an unknown number of desktop users.

Remember when people said the browser wars were over and Microsoft had won? Yeah. Anyway, Brockmeier's article also notes that Amazon won't just have all this aggregate info, but in theory can tie the info specifically to the Amazon account holder:

Each Kindle is tied to an Amazon ID, which gives Amazon a great deal of information about you already. Introducing Silk into the mix and Amazon is going to be in a position to know a great deal about your Web browsing habits along with your buying habits and media habits. Now Amazon is in a position to know what books you buy, what shows you watch, the Web sites you visit and much more.

Perhaps it's not just copyright lawsuits that Amazon will be facing with Silk.

Filed Under: browser, data mining, kindle, kindle fire, silk
Companies: amazon

Is Amazon's New Silk 'Cloud' Browser A Huge Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Waiting To Happen?

from the caching dept

There's been plenty of fanfare over Amazon's new Android-based e-reader, the Kindle Fire, with one interesting feature being the new Silk browser, which is differentiated by the fact that it's built on top of Amazon's cloud web services storage, allowing it to effectively cache and optimize content on its own servers. But this raises a big question. As Stephan Kinsella points out, technically, this may be copyright infringment. First up, here's Amazon's video explanation of the browser: Based on the info in that video, Kinsella explains the legal concerns:

One smart thing Silk does to speed up web browsing as seen by the user of the Kindle Fire by “pre-loading” content into Amazon’s “cache” in its own “Amazon computer cloud” (i.e. Amazon’s servers)–and to optimize them for the Kindle Fire (e.g., a 3MB image is scaled down maybe to 50k because that would look the same on the Kindle Fire as a 3MB image, but could be transmitted more quickly). But to do this Amazon’s servers have to store copies of files obtained from other websites, including images (as explicitly stated at 3:07 to 3:26) and other files which, of course, are covered by copyright. At 3:54, it’s explained that if Amazon’s computing cloud sees you looking at the New York Times home page, and it predicts, based on other user statistics, that you are somewhat likely to next click on some NY Times subpage link, then the Amazon servers will go ahead and download that next link, and cache it, in case you do click on it next, so that it can serve it up more quickly. Now this makes sense technically, but what it really means is Amazon’s servers are making copies of other people’s copyright-protected content: images, files, NYTimes web pages, and serving them up to Kindle Fire users as if the Amazon computer cloud servers are the host of those images. It is a bit like if Amazon ran a site called NYTimes2.com, and had its servers constantly copying content from NYtimes.com and duplicating it on NYTimes2.com, and serving up the content on NYTimes2.com (which was copied from NYTimes.com) to browsers.

Of course, as he notes (and as the people in the video note), this makes tremendous technological sense. It makes for a much better experience. But copyright can and often is used to stop innovations that make tremendous technological sense, because they can upset legacy business models. Of course, one could argue that what Amazon is doing here is no different than what Google does with it's cache -- but that might not stop a potential legal fight, unfortunately.

Filed Under: browsers, copyright, ereaders, kindle, kindle fire, silk browser
Companies: amazon

Once Again, Amazon's One-Click Patent Is Found Not To Infringe On Cordance's One-Click Patents

from the there-can-be-only-one-one-click-patent dept

A few years ago, we wrote about a case in which a company called Cordance claimed that Amazon's (infamous) patented one-click "technology" infringed on its own one-click patent (6,757,710). Cordance's patent was actually granted many years after Amazon's technology was on the market (and its patent granted), but Cordance tried to show an earlier priority date through a convoluted set of previous patents and continuations. Thankfully, a jury disagreed with Cordance and said that Amazon didn't infringe, and in the few areas where it might have infringed, Cordance's patent claims were invalid. The judge then changed the ruling to reject the invalidity part -- allowing Cordance to sue a bunch of other companies, including Apple, Paypal and Victoria's Secret.

However, the original case was appealed and, amazingly, CAFC actually ruled against Cordance and sided with the original jury, noting non-infringement for some parts, and the parts where Amazon might infringe... those claims were declared invalid, and predicted by Amazon's own technology. That should be good news for those sued by Cordance in that other case. However, this really highlights the craziness of the patent system. Is it really valuable to have two companies spending years in court arguing over who can do something in one click?

Filed Under: one-click, patents
Companies: amazon, cordance

Tech Titans Shift And Change: Worrying About Dominance Is A Fool's Game

from the this-time-it's-different! dept

I've lived in Silicon Valley for a little over thirteen years now, and the one thing I've learned is that nothing is permanent. When I moved out here, the "big fight" over who was going to dominate the tech landscape was supposed to be between Netscape, Microsoft and AOL. No one had heard of eBay (and people thought that "OnSale" -- an online auction house -- had a better business model). Amazon was around but was "never going to be profitable." Google didn't exist. The search engine of choice was AltaVista or Lycos. Social networking was a site called "SixDegrees." Seriously. It was a big hit the summer of 1998 when everyone was connecting with their friends.

Just a few years ago, it was decided that the battle for the internet was between the "big three" of Google, Yahoo & Microsoft -- better known as GYM. Those three dominated the tech space and there was nobody else "big" worth mentioning.

So, it's a bit funny to see a new report declaring that, today, there's a "Gang of Four" who are fighting to dominate the tech world: Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. GAAF? AGAF? As in the past, the article seems to think that this battle is the permanent state of the world, with those four being the only players. It talks about how this battle is raising antitrust concerns and worries about less openness.

However, I'm with Adam Thierer in thinking this is totally overhyped "chicken little-ism."

Isn’t it funny how all the recent hand-wringing about the supposed dominance of today’s big four fails to mention Microsoft, Intel, AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo!, BlackBerry, or the old telcos? It would have been impossible to pen anything about technology “dominance” in past years and not mention those companies. Today, they rarely get a mention, except perhaps to highlight their rapid fall from the upper echelons of Tech Titan-dom.

This week’s big news was Google’s bid for Motorola, which positions the search giant better for battle in the smartphone and tablet wars with Apple. Think about it: A company that didn’t even exist 15 years ago and got started in a garage is now making telecom giants sweat. Meanwhile, Facebook, a company started in a college dorm, made News Corporation’s $580 million bet on MySpace turn out to be a mega-turkey. Meanwhile, Apple had what former CEO John Sculley called a “near-death experience” just 15 years ago only to experience a Lazarus-like rebirth and revolutionize the computing, online music, and mobile device sectors. Finally, Amazon.com, along with Apple, has upended media distribution methods and forced mass media giants to rethink how content is priced, bringing prices down in the process.

This is capitalism at its finest, not the catastrophe the tech pessimists preach about.

Five years from now, you can pretty much bet we'll be discussing a very different set of companies aiming for tech dominance. Their may be some crossovers, but it's likely that at least one company on the list is one that you've either barely heard of today or you haven't heard of at all. The tech industry is ruthless and ever changing. It's tough to stay on top for very long, and any effort to totally close things off will be seen by smart entrepreneurs as an opportunity to jump in and compete, with openness.

Filed Under: change, disruption, innovation, tech
Companies: amazon, apple, facebook, google

Amazon Stops Accepting Apps In Germany Due To Apple's App Store Trademark Claim

from the playing-trademark-hardball dept

While it appears that Apple is not having much luck in the US in claiming that Amazon violated its trademark by offering an App Store that sells (you guessed it!) apps, apparently it is having an impact in Germany. Copycense points us to the news that Amazon has sent a letter to developers in Germany telling them it can no longer accept any new apps for its app store due to this dispute:

Subject: Important Notice for Germany Based Developers

Dear Amazon Appstore Developer,

Thank you for your participation in the Amazon Appstore for Android.  We wanted to notify you of a recent change to your Developer Portal account; for the time being, we are not accepting new app submissions from developers located in Germany.  We have been forced to impose this restriction due to a legal action filed by Apple in Germany seeking to prevent us from using the term “appstore.”  We believe Apple’s claim is without merit and are actively contesting it.

When you log into your Developer Portal account, you will notice that the options to add new apps have been removed. We hope to begin accepting new apps from German developers again soon and will notify you as soon as we are able to do so.

We appreciate your patience and your continued interest in the Amazon Appstore for Android.

Thank you,

Amazon Appstore Account Team

While I'm guessing this makes Apple happy, it really is showing the world what a bully the company is when it comes to developers. You can get away with that for some time, but when there are real alternatives...

Filed Under: app store, germany, trademark
Companies: amazon, apple

Amazon Prepares For Showdown In California After Budget Includes Amazon Tax

from the how-will-this-help-california dept

Over the past couple of years, a variety of states have tried to implement "Amazon taxes," whereby they change the definition of what counts as "presence" in a state to include if a company has any affiliates. Frankly, this is ridiculous. An affiliate is really nothing more than an advertiser, and it defies common sense to claim that an advertiser counts as a direct employee of a company. Amazon has been fighting these efforts in a variety of states, but it's about to take on a big fight. Apparently, the new California budget includes a version of this Amazon Tax, and the company wasted little time sending out an email to all California Amazon associates (such as us) to let us know that it would be "terminating" the contract unless California changed its mind.

For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of California residents. Unfortunately, a potential new law that may be signed by Governor Brown compels us to terminate this program for California-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers - including but not limited to those referred by California-based marketing affiliates like you - even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

As a result, we will terminate contracts with all California residents that are participants in the Amazon Associates Program as of the date (if any) that the California law becomes effective.

As we've noted before, this is an incredibly short-sighted move by the state. They think it will bring in tax revenue, when all it actually does is kill off affiliates and drives that money elsewhere, to other states. For a state that should be friendly to the internet, considering the whole "Silicon Valley" thing, you'd think the local politicians would know better.

Filed Under: affiliates, california, taxes
Companies: amazon