Will Big Brother Pay? - August 3rd, 2009
I wrote earlier about the possibility of a Kindle Killer entering the ereader market and briefly mentioned Amazon’s fuck up a few weeks ago when they remotely deleted several of their ebooks, including Orwell’s “1984″.
Two Kindle users are hitting back now.
This past Thursday, Antoine Bruguier of California and Justin Gawronski, a high school student from Michigan, filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon for violating the Washington Consumer Protection Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as breaching contract, and intentionally interfering with their belongings.
“Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote to customers. “It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.”
This apology came in late July, after the deletion of the Orwell works without informing Kindle users until after the fact. Apparently, Amazon did not have the rights to distribute the ebooks, but somehow overlooked this as many users downloaded them.
A Rival for Kindle? - July 22nd, 2009
There’s been a lot of news lately surrounding “Big Brother” Amazon and its wildly successful Kindle. Recalling e-books afer purchase? Consumers were refunded, but it definitely rocked the boat when they couldn’t find a replacement for some of the titles.
Plastic Logic, based in Mountain View, California, is making the eReader, available in 2010, that hopes to compete with Amazon’s Kindle. Guess who partnered with them? None other than the world’s largest book store chain, Barnes & Noble. Four months ago, Barnes & Noble aquired the e-book retailer Fictionwise and is now starting its own massive e-bookstore on its website, BN.com. In an announcement Monday, B&N stated that over 700,000 books would be offered and available to be read on a variety of today’s popular devices including the BlackBerry, iPhone, various desktop and laptop computers. Before the aquisition, Fictionwise offered over 600,000 books in its catalogue.
I don’t Digg it. - July 19th, 2009
As many of you on Twitter have seen, link shorteners are key in this 140 character world. A popular choice of shortener is through the Diggbar. A great concept: integrating a traffic counter along with the link shortener in the convenience of a single bar at the top of your browser! Sounds great, right?
Sure, publishers jumped at the chance to increase traffic to their content, up Digg counts, and have a simple way to post the content in a Twitter update.
A few days ago, I noticed that the Diggbar links I clicked on in Tweets ended up at a Digg.com landing page. I had to click on a second link on the cluttered page to get to where I wanted to go in the first place. Did I want to land there? No! I wanted to land right on top of the content! This irked me.