geekosystem

Holiday sales figures are in, and not surprisingly tablets and eReaders were popular gifts this year. Amazon is reporting that Cyber Monday was the best-ever sales day for their Kindle line. A new Pew Research poll shows more people are reading books electronically than ever before, and fewer people are reading physical books now than last year. People reading books electronically doesn't mean printed books are dead. Kindles don't come with the stipulation that, if you own one, you have to burn all your books and vow to never buy one again. You can have both, and, if you're an avid reader, you probably should.

If you were one of the 27 million people on Christmas Eve unable to watch a marathon of holiday specials via Netflix, well, now you have the reason behind this mass outage: The bunglers -- in Netflix's opinion, at least -- that manage the cloud over at Amazon Web Services. The childish game of corporate finger-pointing began when issues with Amazon's cloud knocked out the video streaming service of Netflix, leaving more technologically inclined families without festive entertainment from their mobile devices and other high tech gadgets.

The murky waters of trademark law have churned out their latest victim, and this one's a doozy. Gib van Ert self-published A Long Time Ago: Growing up with and out of Star Wars back in August on Kindle, and it was eventually offered as a paperback version through an Amazon affiliate. It had been available ever since, up until this past Monday, December 24th. Van Ert was sent an email claiming that the online retailer had reviewed his book and blocked it because it contained a trademarked term. In a very real way, Amazon altered the deal.

Bad news, arachnophobes. Biologists working in the Peruvian Amazon believe they may have discovered a new species of spider -- a tiny spider that builds decoys of larger spiders in its web, and manipulates them like puppets. Puppets that are even more terrifying than regular puppets, because they look like spiders.. Commence being creeped out for very good reasons...now.

Since it was announced earlier this year, the Amazon smartphone has been generating plenty of buzz amongst techie circles, curious to know when the phone would be released as well as whether or not it would be able to find its niche in a saturated marketplace. Today, the wheels of the rumor mill are turning full force with the latest hearsay regarding the phone's potential manufacturer. Taiwan Economic News, your one-stop source for economic news from Taiwan, reported that Amazon had granted Foxconn an exclusive contract to produce their smartphones, approximately 5 million of them by 2013. If these rumors are even remotely true, that's a whole lot of phones clogging up warehouses and collecting dust.

Amazon doesn't seem content to wait until next week to start with the holiday offers. It just released the Wi-Fi enable version of its new Kindle Fire HD five days ahead of schedule. That means that holiday shopping season is officially upon us, and even a little faster than usual. At this rate, we'll all be doing our shopping for next Christmas by sometime around President's Day, and will probably just skip the other holidays altogether.

Amazon's really wanting to bolster their Amazon Prime subscriptions, apparently. The annual subscription, which runs $79, wasn't cutting it for them. If you're the type of person that regularly purchases items from the online retailer, the annual account's worth it for the free two-day delivery alone. In addition to that, Amazon Prime also offers a collection of television shows and films that subscribers can watch, like Netflix. Also like Netflix, Amazon Prime's just added a $7.99 monthly plan. That means streaming plus all the other goodies associated with an Amazon Prime account for the same price as just streaming elsewhere.

If you're Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, using your homepage to call out a competitor is one of the most prominent ways to do so. Following the iPad Mini announcement by Apple, there have been many comparisons made to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets. The majority of these have wondered how Apple intends to compete effectively when there are other options available that have higher specifications while still managing to be cheaper. Amazon's asking the same question by directly comparing the capabilities of Apple's offering to their own.

Digital rights management, often referred to as simply DRM, is the all-encompassing term used for just about anything that's meant to combat online piracy. Part of the greater DRM schema is the current business model that most digital distribution sales actually only license out their content. This can lead to some odd situations. For example, Amazon recently wiped a woman's Kindle and closed her account, because the company had determined her account was "directly related" to an account that had been closed by the online retailer before. When asked to clarify, Amazon merely reiterated their stance.

The trick to being a drug dealer, or so I'm told, is understanding that one must build a clientele. The key to financial success is to offer a taste for free in order to hook folks. You're want to provide a service, after all, not just score a single sale. This mindset is also apparently shared by Amazon, as they make no profit on the sales of their Kindle Fire HD or Paperwhite. Amazon's profits instead come from the odds and ends purchased via these platforms.

Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite, the newest version of their dedicated E-reader, doesn't seem like it would be incredibly popular with the reverse-engineering, hardware-hacker set: It's black and white, and really one designed with purpose in mind... reading. Then again, maybe that's exactly why someone decided to jailbreak it, opening up to world for adventurous Kindle-users to new and exciting features like... weather widgets, and other stuff you could've done if you had gotten a fully-functional tablet instead.

The eBook pricing dispute between Amazon and pretty much every other provider has had some nasty repercussions. In general, though, the traditional brick and mortar businesses aren't a big fan of the way Amazon operates, with promotions where they specifically suggest folks shop in stores and then buy from their online portal instead. Wal-Mart has now made the call to stop stocking Amazon's Kindle tablet.

Amazon's big press conference has wrapped and before you ask, nope, we did not get an Amazon phone. We did get several new Kindle options, including the Paperwhite, which could be the new weapon of choice for users interested in a pure, stripped down, e-reader. Keep reading for specs and impressions on what Amazon is bringing to the tablet party this time around.

The law is a complicated subject. When writing briefs for the court, folks tend to be rather verbose. This stems from the fact that, they're often lawyers, and they usually want to eliminate any possibility of confusion. Enter Bob Kohn. When Kohn was informed that he could only submit five pages for his amicus brief in response to the Department of Justice's proposed settlement over eBook price fixing, he decided to submit the brief as a comic.

Data archiving and backup storage can be an expensive proposition. Nobody wants to lose those thousands of files they've spent time compiling, especially not corporations, but current methods of storage tend to either cost an exorbitant amount or fail to provide the right services. That's where Amazon is looking to fill a niche. In order to better serve the archiving and backup needs of the many, they have launched Amazon Glacier.