Motorola Atrix 4G goes up on AmazonWireless, $150 on February 11th — mistake? (update: Inspire 4G, too)

We suspect the boys and girls over at AmazonWireless threw their Atrix 4G product page up early, because — among other red flags — the buy button doesn’t work, but one important detail we can glean from it is that they seem interested in selling it for $149.99 on a new contract or $599.99 off-contract. Now, there are a couple of possibilities here; first off, since the page likely isn’t supposed to be online, these prices might just be guesses or placeholders, but furthermore, keep in mind that AmazonWireless and other third-party wireless resellers typically charge less for devices on contract than carriers do, so we’d expect this to be at least $50 more directly from AT&T. Oh, and one other tidbit: searching for the phone on Amazon reveals a possible release date of February 11th, which would be even more aggressive than Moto’s end-of-February guidance. Again, possibly another guess or placeholder on Amazon’s part… but it’s a date to keep in the back of your head nonetheless.

[Thanks, Roman]

Update: Turns out the Inspire 4G is listed, too, for $99.99 on contract or $499.99 contract-free. Thanks, Justin S.!

Update 2: …and they’re gone. Whoops!

Motorola Atrix 4G goes up on AmazonWireless, $150 on February 11th — mistake? (update: Inspire 4G, too) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon celebrates its first ‘$10 billion quarter’ in sales, finds Kindle books overtaking paperbacks

July 19, 2010 marked the day that Amazon’s digital book sales eclipsed the sales of hardcover books, and it barely took half a year for those e-book sales to also overtake the sales of paperbacks. According to the ouftit’s latest earnings release, “Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com.” The company had surmised that this would happen by Q2 of this year, but it clearly went down a lot earlier than even it expected. Bezos and co. also sold through $12.95 billion worth of goods, representing The Jungle’s first “$10 billion quarter.” That came up to $416 million in net income, representing an eight percent uptick year-over-year. Of note, operating income slipped from $476 million in Q4 2009 to $474 million this year, with the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates generating a staggering $18 million hit.

When looking at 2010 as a whole, Amazon’s sales were up 40 percent over 2009, with operating income rising some 25 percent to $1.41 billion compared to the whole of 2009. Speaking specifically of the Kindle, the company is now moving 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperbacks sold, but this obviously only takes into account the US book business. We’re still no closer to finding out exactly how many Kindles have been moved, but we’re told that “millions” of the third-gen model were moved in Q4 2010, and the Kindle Storeitself has over 810,000 books on its digital shelves. Head on past the break if you’re thirsty for more, Sir Economist.

Continue reading Amazon celebrates its first ‘$10 billion quarter’ in sales, finds Kindle books overtaking paperbacks

Amazon celebrates its first ‘$10 billion quarter’ in sales, finds Kindle books overtaking paperbacks originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kindle Singles available now on Amazon

Hey, kids! Kindle Singles — Amazon’s really, really short books for people with short attentions spans — have finally gone live. And you know what that means? You can finally get a copy of Mark Greif’s Octomom and the Politics of Babies delivered to your e-reader via Amazon Whispernet for the low, low price of $2. Even if you’re not keen on hearing some academic sound off on a certain Ms. Nadya Suleman (at least, that’s the impression we get from the description) it looks like they have quite a selection of essays, articles, and memoirs on the Singles site. Hit the source link to check ’em out or, if you’re still not convinced, peep the PR after the break.

Continue reading Kindle Singles available now on Amazon

Kindle Singles available now on Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon agrees to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm

Amazon has just announced it has agreed terms to buy up all the remaining shares of Lovefilm it didn’t already own. The British outfit operates a subscription-based movie rental and streaming service in its home market along with Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and should give Amazon a very solid base from which to build its presumably Netflix-besting ambitions. Lovefilm has been just about the closest thing Europe has had to the ridiculously successful North American movie distributor and Amazon is arguably getting in just in time, given Netflix’s overtures toward expanding into the UK. Customary closing conditions will need to be met before the final stamp of approval is applied, but the acquisition is expected to complete by the end of Q1 of this year. Amazon’s wading into yet more content distribution, who’d have thunk it?

Continue reading Amazon agrees to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm

Amazon agrees to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 04:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon agrees deal to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm

Amazon has just announced it has agreed terms to buy up all the remaining shares of Lovefilm it didn’t already own. The British outfit operates a subscription-based movie rental and streaming service in its home market along with Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and should give Amazon a very solid base from which to build its presumably Netflix-besting ambitions. Lovefilm has been just about the closest thing Europe has had to the ridiculously successful North American movie distributor and Amazon is arguably getting in just in time, given Netflix’s overtures toward expanding into the UK. Customary closing conditions will need to be met before the final stamp of approval is applied, but the acquisition is expected to complete by the end of Q1 of this year. Amazon’s wading into yet more content distribution, who’d have thunk it?

Continue reading Amazon agrees deal to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm

Amazon agrees deal to buy UK movie streaming and rental service Lovefilm originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 04:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others

You love your Kindle, but you hate the DRM. What do you do? Well, if you like, we’ll tell you how to strip the copy-protection from your e-books, leaving a plain, vanilla e-book file in the format of your choice. This doesn’t just work for Kindle book, either. The method, detailed by Apprentice Alf, will also remove DRM from Mobipocket, Barnes and Noble, Adobe Digital Editions and Fictionwise books, making these stores much more attractive to buyers.

For the meat of the how-to, you should visit Apprentice Alf’s blog post, which is both straightforward and detailed. I managed to get it up and running in a couple minutes. For a quick version – focussing on the Kindle, read on.

First, get a copy of the free e-book manager, Calibre. This catalogs and converts your e-books from format to format. With a couple of plugins, it will also strip all DRM from them.

Next, you need those plugins, also linked from Alf’s post. Depending on what kind of books you want to fix-up, you may have to configure these plugins. For the Kindle, you need only install it in the right place.

Then download Kindle for Mac or Window, and from there download the books you have already bought and want cracked. Then locate the downloaded files on your hard-drive. Mac users will find them in a folder called My Kindle Content, inside the documents folder. These are titled with non-human-friendly names like “B002AU7MEK_EBOK.azw”, so just pick anything that seems to be a big enough file for an e-book (500k-plus). Then drag these files into Calibre.

That’s it. Your files are now DRM-free, and you can use Calibre to convert then to any format. EPUB is the one you need for the iPad or iPhone, but you can choose pretty much anything.

Oddly, since I tried this over the weekend, Kindle books have become a lot more attractive to me. Previously I was buying novels and things I might read once only. Now I’m looking at cookbooks and reference books, pricier purchases that I didn’t make before in case one day I stopped using the Kindle, or if Amazon decided to revoke my ownership of a book like it did, infamously, with Orwell’s 1984. Now, with my books safely converted, I can buy anything, and use it anywhere.

Ebook Formats, DRM and You — A Guide for the Perplexed [Apprentice Alf]

See Also:


Apple Drops iTunes Plus Prices to 99 Cents!

This article was written on October 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

itunes plus music Oh the benefits of competition are a sweet thing, really! It took Apple approximately three weeks to respond to the launch of Amazon’s DRM-Free Music Store. It was a simple as this- Amazon started selling DRM-free songs for 89 cents to a maximum of 99 cents while Apple’s iTunes was selling DRM-free songs for $1.29. When we wrote about the whole Amazon deal, we said that Amazon’s move may have actually caused Steve Jobs to get a bit concerned now that iTunes has a real competitor, and it appears this was true. Apple made the official announcement today that DRM-free songs from iTunes Plus will now be sold at 99 cents, obviously to match the competition.

Prior to this change, users were able to upgrade their DRM-infested songs to the DRM-free version for 30 cents, the difference between what they originally paid for the song (99 cents) and what the going rate for DRM-free was at the time ($1.29), which made sense. From the sounds of it though, Apple is still going to charge users the 30 cents if they want to upgrade, despite the fact that there’s no difference in price between songs from iTunes and iTunes Plus. This hasn’t been confirmed, so if you decide you want to upgrade some of your songs to DRM-free, let us know if you were still charged the 30 cents.

All that’s left to say is, YAY for competition! For once Apple was left squirming and had to respond, and thankfully they did!

Source: Ars

Thanks for the tip Cory!

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Rovi sues Amazon and IMDb for infringing TV guide patents

Rovi sounds friendly enough, but the company used to be called Macrovision — and the infamous DRM provider just sued Amazon’s IMDb.com last week for infringement of five TV guide patents. The patents came along with Rovi’s acquisition of Gemstar, and they cover everything from interactive program guides to purchasing products on-demand to scheduling recordings from a computer — a huge range that seems to hit everything from QVC to the Xfinity TV iPad app. That probably explains why Rovi says it has deals with everyone from Apple to Yahoo — between its TV listings products, recent purchase of a sizable video library, and the current litigation with IMDb, it appears that the company is serious about leaving its DRM-centric roots behind and moving into internet content distribution.

Rovi sues Amazon and IMDb for infringing TV guide patents originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Read (Some of) Your Own Books on Kindle for iPad

You can now add your own ebooks to Amazon’s Kindle App on iOS devices, as well as books from Project Gutenberg and other copyright-free sources. Great news, right? Not so fast.

The release notes for the iPad and iPhone app contains this line:

Access millions of free and out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and other online sources. Open supported files from Safari and Mail or use File Sharing in iTunes to transfer files to your Kindle app. [emphasis added]

That makes it sound like you can load up your EPUB-format books, right? Or at the very least a range of “supported formats”, given the wording. The problem is that you can only use Kindle files, so just dropping in all those EPUBs you’ve relucantly been keeping in iBooks isn’t possible.

And the addition of all those free Gutenberg texts? These are exactly the same texts that have always been available to the hardware Kindle, formatted for the device. You’ll need to download them and transfer them yourself, either via email or using iTunes Sharing.

And talking of iTunes, the Kindle app will let you drag anything and everything in there, including PDFs and EPUBs, although these aren’t actually recognised by the Kindle app.

So it seems that the only big new feature is iTunes transfers, and the ability to open Kindle-format files from emails. You also get a few tweaks. The icon has been uglified with orange text, and the icon view of your library (the “Home” section) now has much bigger thumbnails for your books. The problem here is that they still use the same artwork, scaled up and therefore rather blurry. The app also adds multi-tasking, and can continue to download a book when you quit it.

Finally, here’s a workaround to get your own books into the Kindle app. Grab a copy of the (free) software Calibre, which manages ebooks. Drop in your EPUBS, or whatever you have, and convert them to MOBI format. They will now work on the Kindle.

Kindle for iOS [iTunes]

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M-Edge: Make Your iPad Look Like a Book

fahrenheit 451 ipad.jpg

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns. I’m not sure what temperature it would take to ignite, but I imagine it would be considerably hotter. There’s something about the concept of an iPad wrapped up in the cover of that Ray Bradbury classic that really caught my imagination. I’m not whether it’s a good thing or not.
You see, gadgets like the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad certainly get points for keeping people, but for someone like myself who really does still fetishize paper books, it’s maybe a little troubling.
Of course, that book is just one of several titles you can pick to cover your iPad or Kindle, courtesy of the folks at M-Edge. The Website lets people create their own cover for those devices, either by uploading their own design or picking a number of pre-configured ones, a list that also includes classic covers of Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and several issues of The New Yorker.