Making Time to Read

Remember all that speculation that Amazon would one day start giving away Kindle e-readers for free? In fact, the company is going in the opposite direction: Amazon introduced on Wednesday a new, high-end e-reader, the Kindle Voyage, that starts at $199 for the version with ads and goes all the way up to $289 for an ad-free, 3G version. Not only is it expensive for an e-reader, it is twice as expensive as the most basic tablet that Amazon also launched Wednesday.

So what will you get for your money? The Kindle Voyage is thinner and lighter than previous devices. It has a totally flat glass screen, without the raised plastic bezel that is present on cheaper models, and the screen is high-resolution, with 300 pixels per inch. Like the Kindle Paperwhite, the Voyage is front-lit, but its light is better — it can go “39 percent brighter” and…

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Authors United may not want to admit it, but most books are consumer goods like any other

16 September 2014 by particularkev

Gigaom

As my colleague Laura Owen has reported, Authors United — a group of writers who are upset at the tactics Amazon is using to negotiate with the French publisher Hachette — has posted a letter to the company’s board of directors, arguing that the online retailer is being unfair to authors. Among other things, the group says Amazon is making a mistake by treating books like any other consumer product.

In fact, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events for a group that is supposedly protesting Amazon’s methods — the refusal to allow advance orders of Hachette books, the removal of some books from the search index, and so on — Authors United makes an odd admission: it agrees Amazon “has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler.”

But wait — isn’t that exactly what Amazon is doing with…

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