E-commerce, Amazon Kindle | featured news

With the rumblings from Amazon about the early success of its new Kindle Fire over the holiday season, the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results came as a surprise. More surprising was Amazon’s silence regarding total Kindle Fire sales for the quarter. During the earnings call, Amazon’s executive team deferred questions about the device to the press release, which simply regurgitated sales data from December.

Amazon's Kindle Fire is a Catch-22 for retailers: The $199 tablet computer could both help Christmas traffic and hurt future sales.

After months of speculation, it's here: Amazon's tablet, the $199 Kindle Fire, was unveiled Wednesday. Smaller and cheaper than Apple's dominant iPad, the Kindle Fire has a 7-inch display and runs on a heavily customized version of Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system. The tablet offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but no 3G or other cellular connection. It also lacks a camera and microphone, two features found in most rival tablets.

One month after Amazon announced that its third-generation Kindle "eclipsed 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' as the bestselling product in Amazon’s history," CEO Jeff Bezos announces: "Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com."

Amazon.com has unveiled a program that will give authors and publishers a larger share of revenue from each Kindle e-book they sell beginning on June 30, 2010. The 70-percent royalty option offers 70 percent of list price ...

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

The mobile version of Google Book Search gives would-be Amazon Kindle buyers another option for reading classic literature on-the-go.