The big question, then, is "What is the right price for eBooks?" This prediction is that the right price for mass market eBooks will prove to be less than $10. December 26, 2010 is chosen as the prediction day because it's important for eBook sellers to have correct pricing in place for shoppers who have received reader devices as Christmas presents.

A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Why did you build it?

Because Silicon Alley Insider said it was a billion dollar business. A billion dollar business sounded good to us.

(a zero billion dollar business)

Amazon EC2 is an on-demand cloud computing solution from Amazon. It allows users to rent computing power on an as-needed basis. Pebl can reserve, create, use and terminate EC2 instances automatically.

I use the Amazon API to check wishlists programmatically, and back in March I mentioned that it was being upgraded in a way that would break the Python wrapper I’d been using for years. Readers pointed me to a new wrapper called PyAWS, but I found that it didn’t offer the one thing I needed: A simple way to retrieve all the ISBNs on a wishlist.

As a special offer for Oprah viewers, Amazon.com is giving $50 off the price of Kindle. Enter the promotional code OPRAHWINFREY during the checkout process at Amazon.com to receive the discount. This offer is valid through November 1, 2008.

collected blog posts re mturk

Research testing with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. 10 accounts of using Turk to get research data and experiments; some protocols of use; successes, failures noted; concern about fairness of wages; why do people turk; constructing use cases as turk tasks for beta testing software.

[This is an excellent book, by the way] Hey: If you're already using one of my Greasemonkey scripts to embed links to the Pittsburgh, Rochester, NY, or Gainesville, FL public library catalogs into Amazon book listings, you may have noticed that they've stopped working. This was due to a change in Amazon's book pages, but I've fixed the problem and updated the scripts. You can just install an updated script to make it all better.

ScoutPal quickly gives you up-to-the-minute values on your cell phone for books and merchandise listed on amazon.com; wireless lookups can also optionally report marketplace prices from abebooks.com and PriceGrabber.com, as well as lookup by title or Library of Congress Catalog number. For instant database lookups on a Pocket PC (cell phone connection not required), we offer ScoutPalDB.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has fallen prey to social media spammers and it is now full of requests to spam bookmarking services for pennies per link. Although these HITs may stop short of being "fraud" in the legal sense of the word, they are certainly dishonest and unsavory. In addition to these spam bookmarking requests, we're also seeing HITs for Diggs, Stumbles, Slashdots, etc. of spammers' web pages and web sites.

Earlier this week my colleague Deepak Singh pointed me to a blog post written by Thomas Brox Røst. In the post, Thomas talks about how he combined traditional hosting with an EC2-powered, batch mode page regeneration system. His site (Eventseer) contains over 600,000 highly interconnected pages. As traffic and content grew, serving up the pages dynamically became prohibitively expensive. Renerating all of the pages on a single server would have taken an unacceptably long 7 days, and even longer as the site became more complex. Instead, Thomas used a cloudbursting model, regenerating the pages on an array of 25 Amazon EC2 instances in just 5 hours (or, as he notes, "roughly the cost of a pint of beer in Norway."). There's some more information about his approach on the High Scalability blog. Thomas has also written about running Django on EC2 using EBS.

Het was me tot op heden ontgaan dat er ook een mobiele versie van Library Thing bestaat. Superpatron schreef er gisteren over en wijst daarbij op de soepele koppeling met Amazon, dat bij een doorklik direct registreert dat je navigeert op een mobiel apparaat.

A stripped-down version of LT designed for reading on phones; it currently has a link to the Amazon site on every book detail page, which also gives you an appropriately stripped down version when you browse on the phone.

I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on monochrome screens some ten to fifteen years ago; even the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal started printing color pages about then. E-Ink displays are kind of like dancing bears — it’s not great dancing, but it’s remarkable that it dances at all. Amazon’s Kindle is an interesting exception, because it’s not really about reading.

The book reading function is a decoy to disguise a portable shopping device. The one click is a well known Amazon purchase feature. The connected Kindle device makes this relation portable and the format is just as accessible for a baby register or power tools as it is for books. Its also worth a mention that Kindle sells print books.

Today Abebooks, the Canadian bookseller, announced that it was being acquired by Amazon, a company that needs little introduction. (See Amazon press release, Abebooks press release pending.)

More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect.

In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior

The Amazon Pittsburgh Libraries Linky is a Greasemonkey script that inserts status information from the Allegheny County Library catalog into book listings from Amazon.com.

“A big part of [it] is cross-channel — starting to bring the power and benefits of the different channels together,” something Borders couldn’t do before, said Kevin Ertell, vice president of e-business at Borders, Ann Arbor, MI.

First, the team has released v1.0.0 of the Command Line Tools, a set of command line interfaces allowing you to easily build solutions that use Amazon Mechanical Turk, without writing a line of code

daniel notices the deficiences in google base

he Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard (VMD) is a powerful open source, web-based virtual machine manager for the XEN hypervisor. Designed to answer the challenges of fragmented hosting environments, Enomalism provides an easy to use interface to p

Seth Godin: "You can see which books cite a book you like. Try doing that at the local library..." note to self, is this data exposed through an API?

The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based book retailer Borders won’t be the last of Amazon.com’s partners to fly the coop. The word on the street is that another one of their partners, one with cool and iconic television and billboard advertising has issued an RFP

Borders Group Inc. is dumping its online book-selling relationship with Amazon.com Inc. and will sell books on its own on the Web. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders also announced plans to close 250 Waldenbooks stores by 2008,

Now there's an exciting new service called Coin to Card™ that gives you free coin counting when you turn your coins into a Gift Card or eCertificate at participating Coinstar® Centers.

this is the low end labeler at staples about $30

very simple version of what I use bookburro for

as mentioned on scripting news

back up your data to s3, akin to rsync. do you use the tag backup or backups?

u michigan si class on reputation system design and analysis

recommended by howardgr as better than Jungle Disk.

hot books in ann arbor / links to amazon

amazon as a cheap way to host media files; howto in python.

We report on techniques that are employed by authors,
artists, editors, and readers to ensure they promote their agendas
while they build their identities as experts. We suggest a framework
for discussing the changes of the categories of authorship,
c

use s3 via "bitbucket" library to push all your photos from Flickr onto Amazon S3.

HIT-Builder allows high volume turking services, w/data analysis. dump a bunch of questions in from a database or spreadsheet, get back results similarly.

Udi is extra super smart, this is a win for Google. Pity their stock is doing so poorly.

aha, putting some pieces together. next task is to port this from keene to aadl

another library catalog discovering and adapting jon udell's liibrarylookup greasemonkey script

how to add links to the Ann Arbor District Library's holdings into your Amazon browsing.

although they don't say it, there are some street shots of Detroit in here too

ecto makes it easy to bookblog. now if you only had time to read books.