Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

Lore and Bharara did about $180 million in revenue in 2009 and expect to bring in about $300 million in 2010. Just five years old, Quidsi (the name means "what if?" in Latin) is already breaking even in a category that wasn't supposed to work on the internet: Quickly shipping bulky, low-margin commodities. The partners don't make money on diapers, and never planned to. Diapers are the draw that brings in loyal customers who order over and over. The money comes when a shopper throws in one of the other 25,000 SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, that Diapers.com lists on its site—higher-margin items like brand-name baby shampoo, wipes, and formula.

The Lab covered Amazon’s announcement of less-than-a-book, more-than-as-story Kindle Singles out of the chute a couple of weeks ago. Josh Benton described how the new form could well serve as a new package, a new container, for longer, high-quality investigative pieces, those now being well produced in quantity by ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting (and its California Watch), and the Center for Public Integrity. That’s a great potential usage, I think.

RT @dcurtis: Why I Sold Zappos, by Tony Hseih http://bit.ly/cLg6zp

You really should read this.

Need to spend a certain sum for free shipping on Amazon, but a small amount short? Enter it here and the site returns a list of potential products that will get you to free delivery.