Amazon | featured news

For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc.’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history. A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

Amazon.com issued a detailed account of last week's Web-services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers.

Amazon.com Inc reported that first-quarter sales rose 38.2 percent, above analysts' forecasts.

The retailer launched the new service in San Jose, Calif., as it seeks to adapt to competitive threats from Amazon.com and others.

Companies are expected to reassess backup and recovery after the interruption at Amazon Web Services.

Amazon.com said it will allow readers to borrow Kindle books free at more than 11,000 U.S. libraries, a new twist in the growing battle for market share among electronic tablet makers.

Amazon will lower the price of its electronic reader by showing ads as screensavers and at the bottom of the home screen, and by selling special offers.

I stared at my computer screen. There, sitting in my inbox was an email that confirmed the world around me had gone totally and utterly, bone-fide, stark-raving, strait-jacket wearing, mad. I read the first line. It said:“Shed! Your book is number 44 on Amazon... Congratulations!”

Amazon has just entered the streaming music business with the launch of Cloud Player, a music player that lets anyone upload their music to Amazon's servers and play them via the web or Android.

Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old author who shot to fame by selling more than a million copies of her self-published books, has signed up with a traditional publisher for her next series.St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, will publish Ms. Hocking’s “Watersong” series, four books in the young-adult paranormal genre.A heated auction for the rights to publish her books began early last week, and several major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, dropped out as the price climbed into the seven figures.