More than three months after releasing software for Windows-users to send documents to a Kindle, Amazon has now released the Mac version. Announced on Tuesday afternoon, the "Send to Kindle for Mac" application allows Mac users to wirelessly send personal documents to their Kindles via drag-and-drop in the Dock or within the app itself. Users can also send documents to the Kindle by printing from any Mac application.

As we wrote in January when the Windows version was released, each Kindle already comes with its own e-mail address so users can send files to themselves. (There's also an Instapaper mechanism for sending documents to Kindle.) The desktop software aims to make that process easier, however, by eliminating the need to involve an e-mail client (especially convoluted in the case of printing from an app, which would involve printing to PDF and then sending that PDF to your Kindle). Users don't have to be sending documents to a hardware Kindle either—files can be sent to a Kindle app on a mobile device, too (such as the iPad or an Android phone).

According to Amazon, users can also use the Mac software to archive documents in your Kindle library for download later if you don't want those files to show up and take up space on your device right away. "Your last page read along with bookmarks, notes, and highlights are automatically synchronized for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across your Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Android," the company said in a statement.




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Many of publishing's big developments from 2011 will continue to shape the industry in 2012. So with that in mind, here's a look at five of the most important lessons from last 12 months.

Amazon is, indeed, a disruptive publishing competitor

If it wasn't apparent before, Amazon's publishing intentions became plainly obvious this year. The wave started out small, with a host of expanding self-publishing tools for authors, but it grew to tsunami proportions as Amazon launched imprint after imprint, from romance to science fiction. Amazon also hired industry heavy-hitter Larry Kirshbaum, who "is charged with building something that will look like a general trade publisher.'"

Some of Amazon's publishing projects.

Amazon further extended its reach into publishing when it launched the Kindle Owner's Lending Library. The ebook lending waters already were murky and contentious for publishers — HarperCollins instigated a memorable dustup, as did Penguin — but Amazon's move into the space caused a full-fledged uproar among publishers as well as authors, and may have damaged the publisher-library relationship further.

O'Reilly's Joe Wikert highlighted one of the main problems from the publisher perspective:

As Amazon stated in its press release, "For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee." So no matter how popular (or unpopular) the publisher's titles are, they get one flat fee for participation in the library. I strongly believe this type of program needs to compensate publishers and authors on a usage level, not a flat fee. The more a title is borrowed, the higher the fee to the publisher and author. Period.

And Amazon may be encroaching on feature magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker as well. In a sign of possible things to come, freelance journalist Marc Herman took his long-form story, "The Shores of Tripoli," and expanded it into a $1.99 Kindle Single. According to his blog, he has plans to expand on the model, which would further sideline traditional publishing avenues.

Publishers aren't necessary to publishing

Authors have figured out they don't need publishers to publish books. The self-publishing book market saw quite a boom this year as the publishing format started becoming more mainstream and the services offered by self-publishing companies became more comprehensive — providing authors with platforms, sales, marketing, editing, etc.

Amazon has a role in this boom as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Amazon.com Inc. fueled the growth [in self-publishing] by offering self-published writers as much as 70% of revenue on digital books, depending on the retail price. By comparison, traditional publishers typically pay their authors 25% of net digital sales and even less on print books."

Another trend emerged this year to further sideline the publisher's role: the rise of the agent-publisher. This controversial and contentious business model allows agents to step in to provide expanded publishing services to authors. In an interview, Booksquare's Kassia Krozser explained that the new agent-publisher role emerged because of failings on the part of traditional publishers: "Traditional publishers need to not only rethink how they sell their value to authors and agents, but they also need to rethink the economic structure of their deals." Krozser also expressed concerns that the agent-publisher role carries a conflict of interest — see her interview here.

Readers sure do like ebooks

There good news is that people are still reading and they're embracing the digital transformation. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) released a report in November that showed that readers are solidly committing to digital books. A couple highlights from the report:

Power buyers are spending more. More than 46% of those who say they acquire e-books at least weekly ... report that they have increased their dollars spent for books in all formats, compared with 30.4% of all survey respondents.

"... nearly 50% of print book consumers who have also acquired an e-book in the past 18 months would wait up to three months for the e-version of a book from a favorite author, rather than immediately read it in print."

The number of devices sold is telling as well. A Pew report found that "ereader ownership growth in the U.S. doubled in six months, from 6% to 12% of adults owning an ebook reader."

Though the new Kindle Fire is selling at a loss, Amazon reported that it is selling Kindles at a clip of "well over one million Kindle devices per week" — at least for the three weeks following Black Friday. Amazon hasn't disclosed the total number of devices it has sold, but one analyst estimates the sales to be 8% of total revenues in 2011 and predicts that amount will rise to 9.9% in 2012. So ... a lot of Kindles. Combine those numbers (vague as they might be) with the 40 million iPads sold, and the conclusion is clear: ereading is now mainstream.

HTML5 is an important publishing technology

HTML5 entered the publishing space in a big way this year — some calling it the "future of digital publishing." From storage to multimedia to content behavior (think shaking the iPhone or automatically sizing for different screen sizes) to geolocation to a host of other interactive features, HTML5 has squared itself up to become an important player in the industry. Amazon (mostly) embraced it in its Kindle Format 8, and HTML5 is supported in EPUB3.

HTML5 is platform agnostic and may even be able to save — or make — publishers money. In an interview early in the year, Google's Marcin Wichary explained:

It's very important to recognize that HTML5 fits all the devices you can think of, from the iPhone in your pocket to Google TV to the tablets to small screens and big screens. It's very easy to take the content you already have and through the "magic" of HTML5, refine it so it works very well within a given context. You don't have to do your work over and over again. Of course, all of these different means come with different monetization opportunities, like ads on the web or on mobile devices.

You can view Wichary's full interview below.



DRM is full of unintended consequences

It turns out DRM does more than provide publishers with a false sense of security — locking the content of books also locks those books into a platform (ahem, Kindle). This point was highlighted by author Charlie Stross in a November blog post in which he argued that DRM had become a strategic tool for Amazon:

... the big six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can't read those locked Kindle ebooks — and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM ... If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position.

So, to recap, we've learned that DRM doesn't stop anyone from pirating, nor does it come with the necessary data to support its impact. But it does give publishers one thing: a longer length of rope with which to hang themselves.

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Related:

"Hating Amazon is not a strategy"

Do agent-publishers carry a conflict of interest?

Publishers: What are they good for?

Book piracy: Less DRM, more data

What if a book is just a URL?

Many of publishing's big developments from 2011 will continue to shape the industry in 2012. So with that in mind, here's a look at five of the most important lessons from last 12 months.

Amazon is, indeed, a disruptive publishing competitor

If it wasn't apparent before, Amazon's publishing intentions became plainly obvious this year. The wave started out small, with a host of expanding self-publishing tools for authors, but it grew to tsunami proportions as Amazon launched imprint after imprint, from romance to science fiction. Amazon also hired industry heavy-hitter Larry Kirshbaum, who "is charged with building something that will look like a general trade publisher.'"

Some of Amazon's publishing projects.

Amazon further extended its reach into publishing when it launched the Kindle Owner's Lending Library. The ebook lending waters already were murky and contentious for publishers — HarperCollins instigated a memorable dustup, as did Penguin — but Amazon's move into the space caused a full-fledged uproar among publishers as well as authors, and may have damaged the publisher-library relationship further.

O'Reilly's Joe Wikert highlighted one of the main problems from the publisher perspective:

As Amazon stated in its press release, "For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee." So no matter how popular (or unpopular) the publisher's titles are, they get one flat fee for participation in the library. I strongly believe this type of program needs to compensate publishers and authors on a usage level, not a flat fee. The more a title is borrowed, the higher the fee to the publisher and author. Period.

And Amazon may be encroaching on feature magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker as well. In a sign of possible things to come, freelance journalist Marc Herman took his long-form story, "The Shores of Tripoli," and expanded it into a $1.99 Kindle Single. According to his blog, he has plans to expand on the model, which would further sideline traditional publishing avenues.

Publishers aren't necessary to publishing

Authors have figured out they don't need publishers to publish books. The self-publishing book market saw quite a boom this year as the publishing format started becoming more mainstream and the services offered by self-publishing companies became more comprehensive — providing authors with platforms, sales, marketing, editing, etc.

Amazon has a role in this boom as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Amazon.com Inc. fueled the growth [in self-publishing] by offering self-published writers as much as 70% of revenue on digital books, depending on the retail price. By comparison, traditional publishers typically pay their authors 25% of net digital sales and even less on print books."

Another trend emerged this year to further sideline the publisher's role: the rise of the agent-publisher. This controversial and contentious business model allows agents to step in to provide expanded publishing services to authors. In an interview, Booksquare's Kassia Krozser explained that the new agent-publisher role emerged because of failings on the part of traditional publishers: "Traditional publishers need to not only rethink how they sell their value to authors and agents, but they also need to rethink the economic structure of their deals." Krozser also expressed concerns that the agent-publisher role carries a conflict of interest — see her interview here.

Readers sure do like ebooks

There good news is that people are still reading and they're embracing the digital transformation. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) released a report in November that showed that readers are solidly committing to digital books. A couple highlights from the report:

Power buyers are spending more. More than 46% of those who say they acquire e-books at least weekly ... report that they have increased their dollars spent for books in all formats, compared with 30.4% of all survey respondents.

"... nearly 50% of print book consumers who have also acquired an e-book in the past 18 months would wait up to three months for the e-version of a book from a favorite author, rather than immediately read it in print."

The number of devices sold is telling as well. A Pew report found that "ereader ownership growth in the U.S. doubled in six months, from 6% to 12% of adults owning an ebook reader."

Though the new Kindle Fire is selling at a loss, Amazon reported that it is selling Kindles at a clip of "well over one million Kindle devices per week" — at least for the three weeks following Black Friday. Amazon hasn't disclosed the total number of devices it has sold, but one analyst estimates the sales to be 8% of total revenues in 2011 and predicts that amount will rise to 9.9% in 2012. So ... a lot of Kindles. Combine those numbers (vague as they might be) with the 40 million iPads sold, and the conclusion is clear: ereading is now mainstream.

HTML5 is an important publishing technology

HTML5 entered the publishing space in a big way this year — some calling it the "future of digital publishing." From storage to multimedia to content behavior (think shaking the iPhone or automatically sizing for different screen sizes) to geolocation to a host of other interactive features, HTML5 has squared itself up to become an important player in the industry. Amazon (mostly) embraced it in its Kindle Format 8, and HTML5 is supported in EPUB3.

HTML5 is platform agnostic and may even be able to save — or make — publishers money. In an interview early in the year, Google's Marcin Wichary explained:

It's very important to recognize that HTML5 fits all the devices you can think of, from the iPhone in your pocket to Google TV to the tablets to small screens and big screens. It's very easy to take the content you already have and through the "magic" of HTML5, refine it so it works very well within a given context. You don't have to do your work over and over again. Of course, all of these different means come with different monetization opportunities, like ads on the web or on mobile devices.

You can view Wichary's full interview below.



DRM is full of unintended consequences

It turns out DRM does more than provide publishers with a false sense of security — locking the content of books also locks those books into a platform (ahem, Kindle). This point was highlighted by author Charlie Stross in a November blog post in which he argued that DRM had become a strategic tool for Amazon:

... the big six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can't read those locked Kindle ebooks — and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM ... If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position.

So, to recap, we've learned that DRM doesn't stop anyone from pirating, nor does it come with the necessary data to support its impact. But it does give publishers one thing: a longer length of rope with which to hang themselves.

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Related:

"Hating Amazon is not a strategy"

Do agent-publishers carry a conflict of interest?

Publishers: What are they good for?

Book piracy: Less DRM, more data

What if a book is just a URL?

Amazon started out as a book retailer, a company that was arguably a friend to book publishers, since it expanded the market for many of their books. But increasingly, the web giant is becoming a competitor to those traditional publishers, as the New York Times details in a recent article and as we have noted a number of times. Just as it did with book retailing, Amazon has its sights set on lowering the barriers between authors and readers, both via the Kindle and through its own publishing deals — and in many cases, the biggest barrier between authors and readers is a traditional publisher. Until that changes, Amazon will continue to win.

Although some are just beginning to see the company as a publishing competitor, Amazon has been marshalling its forces for some time now. As GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf has described in a number of posts, the company has been putting together the pieces of a “book industry in a box” for the better part of a year — launching new imprints of its own for various different genres, including one devoted to popular thrillers. Then in May, it hired publishing-industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum, former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group, and opened a New York office.

In the months since then, Amazon has signed deals with a number of prominent authors, including one with popular writer Tim Ferriss, whose books — such as The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body — have sold millions of copies. The terms of the deal with Ferriss weren’t released, but the author said “The opportunity to partner with a technology company that is embracing publishing is very different than partnering with a publisher embracing technology.” Amazon also signed thriller writer Barry Eisler, who gained attention earlier this year when he turned down a $500,000 two-book deal with a traditional publishing house and said he planned to self-publish instead.

It’s not just about the money
Why are authors signing these kinds of deals? In some cases it could be about the money (a deal with former TV star Penny Marshall was reportedly for $800,000 according to the New York Times), but in many cases it seems to be mostly about getting past some of the legacy processes that are typical with traditional publishers, and expanding the potential market for a book. The core of the problem confronting the industry is summed up in a comment by Amazon executive Russell Grandinetii in the NYT piece, in which he says:

The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.

If you look at the comments made by Barry Eisler about why he decided to take a deal with Amazon instead of self-publishing, he says virtually nothing about the money, or about other factors that traditional publishers are used to focusing on. It’s the other terms of the deal that he was swayed by: for example, the fact that Amazon was going to come out with an e-book version within a matter of days after the book was finished, and then follow that quickly with a paperback — and that both were going to be sold at a cheaper price, instead of the traditional industry’s approach of trying to charge print prices for electronic books.

What I care about is readers, because without readers I can’t make a living [and] I want people to read a lot. To that end, if I can find a way to get readers books that cost less and are delivered better and faster, I want that.

Just part of a wave of disruption
And as we’ve described before, Amazon signing deals to publish authors is just part of the bigger wave of disruption that is sweeping through the industry: self-publishing via the Kindle is becoming a larger and larger phenomenon, thanks in part to advocates such as JA Konrath and the kind of success that writers like Amanda Hocking have had by publishing their own books. Authors such as John Locke have shown that selling a million copies of a self-published book is not only possible but entirely feasible — and the fact that he and other writers who do so get to keep 70 percent of the proceeds is yet another wakeup call for the traditional industry.

And what kind of response have mainstream publishers had to all of this? Most have just continued to offer the old deals they are used to — deals that serve the publisher’s needs, but not necessarily those of the author. And in some cases, they have tried to punish authors who try to meet those needs themselves: the NYT piece describes how Hawaiian writer Kiana Davenport, who signed a book deal with Penguin last year, was threatened by the publisher after she packaged some of her short stories into a Kindle e-book. Penguin wanted all copies of the book removed from the internet; when the author refused, the publisher cancelled the deal and is now suing her for breach of contract.

Here’s a hint for book publishers: take a lesson from the music industry, and don’t spend all your time suing people for misusing what you believe is your content — think instead about why they are doing this, and what it says about how your business is changing, and then try to adapt to that. Amazon is giving authors what they want, and as long as it continues to do so, you will be at a disadvantage. Wake up and smell the disruption.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Umberto Salvagnin and Marcus Hansson

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
As E-book Sales Grow, So Does DisintermediationDisruptapalooza 2011: how Amazon’s Kindle is changing the portable media gameBuilding a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content

How much wisdom can one glean from a 20-minute chat with Professor Clay Christensen? I would say — if one keeps his mouth shut and asks the right questions — a lot. Here are notable highlights from my chat with the famous Harvard Business School professor, founder of the Innosight Institute and author of such best selling books as The Innovator’s Dilemma and Disrupting Class.

Jobs at hand

Steve Jobs and the company he co-founded just might be one of the few companies to look the innovator’s dilemma right in the eye and stare it into submission. Jobs’ Apple decided that it was better to cannibalize itself rather than have others do it. And so, the briskly selling iPod was replaced by the iPhone, and the iPad became the new low-end computer. When I asked Professor Christensen what made Jobs special, he said, “Jobs never said he understood the customer, but instead he tried to learn what they are trying to do, and that was his genius.”

Why? Because that helps focus on what matters the most: helping your customers get the job done. The professor pointed out that most people tend to focus on the wrong things, especially in the fast changing world of technology. Christensen argued that when companies make products that help make everyday stuff easier and get the job of life (or work) done, in the end customers don’t need any persuasion. That is precisely why a company like Apple can find buyers for its products so much more easily. Christensen pointed out the fundamental insight Steve Jobs had was that he focused on the “job.”

“Jobs are very stable in a sense and don’t change very much,” he said. For example, Julius Caesar used a chariot to get messages across from one city to another. Fed-Ex uses planes and trucks, he said. The job of delivering the packages hasn’t changed; just how it is done has changed.

Companies that realize this are fine, and will always find a way into the future. Apple understood that people would buy music, just not from a record store.  Amazon is another company that has figured out that people love buying books, though it might not be from a bookstore, or even in a paper form. That is one of the reasons it introduced Kindle.

Innovation troubles

I asked the famous academic what he thought of the increasing rhetoric around a decreasing emphasis on fundamental innovation and long term thinking in our society. He said that the problem isn’t with a lack of teaching or learning; instead it is a problem with finance.

Financial institutions and educators have propagated a way of thinking that is poison for innovation, Christensen said. And that thinking is around internal rate of return or IRR. As a result, investors are looking to put money to work fast and take it out as quickly as possible. This behavior is not only prevalent inside companies but also inside the venture business, he said. Christensen said that typically it takes about seven years or so to get a company to the finish line and get a good return on investment. Now compare that with an incremental product (or improvement) that you can flip quickly – that gives a big boost to the IRR.

As a result, venture capitalists are focused on short-term innovations and that is just nuts, he added. “I keep saying, don’t be distracted by the siren song of synthetic message of IRR,” he said. “It is dollars and not IRR percentage that matters.”

Professor Christenen was critical of the migratory capital that sloshes from one sector to another or one country to another – moving in and out after locking in short-term gains. He thought the government should consider a new kind of tax structure that encourages longterm investments and stability. For instance, no capital gains taxes for investments that last as long as eight years. “Then you will find people like Steve Jobs and the vibrancy of innovation will return.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Disruptapalooza 2011: how Amazon’s Kindle is changing the portable media gameWhat Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online mediaTablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars

Amazon has finally announced its long-anticipated Kindle lending library, allowing Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow Amazon's e-books from thousands of libraries across the US. Users will be able to find the Kindle books on their participating public library's website and check them out through Amazon, which will send the book directly to users' devices over Whispersync.

"Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we're excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country," Amazon's Kindle director Jay Marine said in a statement. "We're even doing a little extra here—normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we're fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book."

The ability to make notes and highlights—and subsequently sync them back to the system for review later—is certainly a major plus. The downside, of course, is that the e-books have to be "returned" after a certain period of time, just like any other library book. Amazon doesn't specify on its site how long the books are borrow-able for, but when asked, Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell said that the expiration time varies by library and by the book.

"Generally [it will be] 7-14 days," Campbell told Ars. "We recommend checking with local libraries on questions related to availability and specific books."

Seven to 14 days isn't a lot of time to read an entire book for some people, but it's hard to argue with free, borrowed books. Our only complaint with this announcement is that there seems to be no comprehensive list of the 11,000 participating libraries—even Amazon's FAQ page about public library books remains vague on this question. The requirement is that the library offers e-books via third party service OverDrive, though, so it's safe to assume that most major libraries will be participating to some degree or another. (You Chicagoans out there get to be lazy, as I've already confirmed that Kindle books can be found via the CPL website).

Edit: Removed links to Amazon due to technical (CMS) problems on our end. See comments for proper links for now.




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Amazon said on Wednesday that it will roll out a Kindle Lending Library later this year, which will allow users of the popular e-reader to borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries throughout the United States. While there are some interesting features included in this program — such as the ability to keep the notes you make while reading a borrowed e-book, and transfer them if you buy a copy — the offering also raises questions about who ultimately controls the content in those books, and what happens if Amazon or its publishing partners change their minds about the terms of the arrangement.

The news release from Amazon doesn’t say anything about the details of the program — for instance, whether there is a limit on how long the books can be borrowed for, and if so what it is (maybe libraries get to set the terms?). And it also doesn’t say whether Amazon or the publishers involved will have limits on how many times a library can lend a book.

That’s an important point, because some publishers have already begun to place arbitrary limits on the books they allow libraries to lend. HarperCollins, for example, recently capped its lending program at 26 loans, a limit many libraries and librarians were incensed about. HarperCollins argued that lending books more often than that would hurt its sales and damage the “e-book ecosystem,” saying in a statement:

We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.

in the wake of HarperCollins’ move, some libraries said they would no longer buy books from the publisher for their systems. “The library model has always been you purchase and own it for perpetuity, and I don’t think the format should matter as long as rights are being protected,” Joan Kuklinski of the Central/Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing consortium told Library Journal. “No one tells a library they have to pull their books off the shelf after a certain number of circulations so why should this be different?” An excellent question.

Because e-books are digital rather than physical objects, publishers and distributors like Amazon have far more control over them than they used to, and in some cases, they’ve exerted that power in disturbing ways. In one infamous incident in 2009, Amazon actually yanked e-books from users’ devices electronically after the publisher changed its mind about offering a digital version — and to make the issues raised by the incident even more stark, the books it removed were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which are about the capricious actions of totalitarian states.

More recently, Amazon used its control over its lending API — which third parties use to integrate their services with its offerings — to shut down a book-lending service called Lendle, which is designed to allow users to share books among themselves, something Amazon says it’s in favor of (within certain well-defined limits, of course). The company reinstated Lendle’s access after Lendle changed the terms of its service, but this kind of thing reinforces how much control Amazon has over the contents of the books users believe they have bought and paid for.

As more and more content has moved from the physical to the digital realm, book publishers (and music labels, and newspapers, etc.) have tried to perpetuate the control they used to have over the physical artifact, and in many cases have actually tried to create new forms of control they never had in the physical world. Whether — and how — Amazon and its partners choose to exert this over libraries and book-lending remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Marya and Timetrax23

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
3 Ways Google Can Succeed in E-booksAnalyzing the Social E-bookThe Week E-books Won the War

Amazon Web Services has launched its Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which allows developers to create a push notification system for applications. The service allows companies to deliver messages to customers of their applications or even to other applications in a couple of different formats, among them HTTP and email. Amazon SNS could be used for system administrators in an IT department (notifying clients if they’re hitting a certain limit on storage capacity or that latency on their service is too high), or it could be used to build out notifications for mobile applications, such as letting consumers when friends check into a location, or when they have new email.

Developers using the service pay per instance, as with all Amazon cloud products. The price includes a per-request, notification delivery and data transfer fee, but developers can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers get the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, the first 100,000 notifications over HTTP and the first 1,000 notifications over email free. After that, prices range from 6 cents to $2 per 100,000 messages sent for delivery and 8-15 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req’d):Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Siacoso (aka SC fiasco)

It can be hard to find good news regarding employment thanks the recent financial downturn. Apparently no one told Amazon, who on their Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog announced that they have over 100 positions to fill (it has gone from under 100 to over 100 in the past few weeks):

I’d like to highlight a few of the nearly one hundred open positions on the AWS team. If you are a software engineer, manager, technical writer, program manager, or product manager and you like to work on cutting-edge projects with world-scale impact, you owe it to yourself to look at these positions.

Job hunters can find links open positions in the US and Europe from the AWS career page. There are a huge range of jobs available, including UI designers, software development engineers, database administration, marketing, technical writing and much more, with a number of the positions working APIs and services like  S3, SimpleDB, Mechanical Turk and Elastic Compute. Here’s a sample of the openings:

PHP SDK Developer – You are an experienced PHP developer with a passion for PHP APIs and a desire to help thousands of PHP developers use the AWS cloud to build PHP-based web and Facebook applications quickly (position 110634).
Software Developer – You are a self-starting, self-directing Java developer who is creative and passionate about developing web-based applications which will be used by thousands of developers (position 110635).
Senior Development Manager – You are a dynamic, innovative, and hands-on software development manager who will lead the production of AJAX web apps that enable customers to use our cloud computing services through point-and-click, web-based interfaces.  You will be responsible for leading a central platform team of talented and nimble engineers that work with several teams across AWS to produce great developer tools and websites for our customers (position 110632).
Senior Software Developer – You will fundamentally change the way people build, deploy, and manage cloud applications in a small team running fast to offer AWS customers a brand new service.  You will apply your experience building reliable, scalable, data driven distributed applications, knowledge of web protocols, and in-depth knowledge of several application servers, Linux tools and Java EE architectures. (position 109479).

AWS is certainly one of the big names in cloud computing. Their customers include some big names like The New York Times and Nasdaq, and their App Catalog lists a variety of applications that build on the platform.

You can also find more about the AWS offerings by checking-out the 18 Amazon APIs in our directory.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Amazon S3 API Profile, 57 mashups