Amazon, E-book | featured news

Best-selling author Stephen King has just released a passionate call for greater gun control, titled "Guns." In a coup for Amazon, the essay is available only through its Kindle Store for 99 cents.

The company denies that it conspired with book publishers to raise e-book prices to give Apple’s new iPad a boost, and accuses the government of siding with Amazon.

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched a Kindle lending library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book.

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said that, after less than four years of selling electronic books, it's now selling more of them than printed books. The online retailer said that since April 1, it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books, which would tip the scales further if they were included.

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.

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.

Amazon is selling a self-published book defending pedophiles, sparking discussions about the retailer's obligation to vet items before they are sold in its online stores.

Does the world have room for another App Store? We'll find out soon. Reportedly, Amazon is planning to launch their very own app store for Android-based devices. Amazon already sells eBook content through the Kindle, and while a few games have also emerged for Kindle, having a dedicated app store that would be available...

But as you scroll down the list of Kindle offerings, you can't help but notice all of the steamy writing that seems to be targeted at men--an emotionally uncommitted genre which, if not exactly new, is associated with book publishing less commonly than with "Penthouse Forum."

Apple has sold more than three million iPads since April, but Amazon’s success with the Kindle is cloudier because it doesn’t reveal sales numbers.