While most of the attention on yesterday’s Kindle announcement centered around the new prices and new devices, a couple of interesting articles have turned up about one of the less-in-the-spotlight elements of the Kindle Fire, the new Kindle Silk web browser. According to these more in-depth pieces in Wired Cloudline and TechWorld (found via Slashdot), Silk begins at the same place as previous split-client browsers such as Opera Turbo but then goes further, with a few inherent advantages that are part and parcel of Amazon’s cloud efforts. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the network of computers and...

Read Michel Mace's article, below, and then go read Chris Ziegler's article, excerpted here.  We're in for some interesting times. Initially, I’d figured the Appstore wouldn’t be much more than a way for Amazon to earn a little coin off the booming, highly profitable mobile app business. Instead, they’ve picked the very lock that Google uses to control Android. By creating a legitimate Market alternative with over 10,000 apps (at last count) and the full backing of the Amazon juggernaut, Jeff Bezos no longer needs a thing from Google. And here’s the craziest part: on the...

Michael Mace's Mobile Opportunity blog has an article about the new Amazon tablet and its place in the market. It's entitled Amazon vs. Apple?  No, it's Amazon and Apple vs. everyone else.  You should read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt about what the new Fire tablet means to Google: You're not the licensee Droid is looking for. Google's reaction to Kindle Fire speaks volumes about its goals for Android.  Kindle Fire is based on Android, and will run Android applications.  Android has been struggling in the tablet space, so you'd expect that Google would be delighted to...

From the [e-reads] blog: E-Reads has signed a deal with UK publisher Gollancz to publish e-book editions in the UK and Commonwealth of almost 400 science fiction and fantasy titles as part of Gollancz’s Gateway initiative. Orion deputy CEO and publisher Malcolm Edwards and Gollancz digital publisher Darren Nash negotiated the deal, which includes works by more than 50 authors, with E-Reads founder and president Richard Curtis and agent Danny Baror of Baror International. Titles by authors such as Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Fritz Leiber and George Zebrowski will be published in Gateway...

From The Guardian: Publishers reacted with excitement over the arrival of the devices ahead of Christmas, which last year saw a huge boost to ebook sales as e-readers proved a hit as gifts. Random House UK's digital editor, Dan Franklin, said the low prices would "open up a whole new marketplace of impulse buyers", while Michael Bhaskar of Profile Books said Amazon had "opened the tablet race wide open in a stroke" by its gift market pricing. Bhaskar predicted "hundreds of thousands, at least" of the Kindle Fire devices would be sold in the UK...

From The Bookseller: Nottinghamshire library service has become the first to institute a charge for e-book loans. The service, which launched its e-book programme in August, charges £1 per book loan with payment taken via a PayPal account. Head of libraries Peter Gaw said: "It's quite a difficult budget situation and we felt we weren't in a position to provide it for free at a time when we were cutting back on our hard copy book fund. Our provider is Askews, and the way it is set up, a charge clocks up on each loan. If e-books...

The Kindle No-Touch/No Keyboard $79-$109 Model is available right away and here's a software update for it already Software v4.0.1 update for the Kindle 4 NoTouch/NoKeyboard model is already ready for download as an option.  What it does is allow you to have e-Ink refreshes on every page, as the default is to not have it refresh on each page. Both the Nook and Kobo Touch devices do not have e-Ink refreshes (aka black flash page-turn) on each page.  While that can be nice, others have found that the less frequent black flashes...

This press release may well turn out to be a public service for a lot of parents: M-Edge Accessories, the market leading designer of accessories for tablets and e-readers, today unveils the SuperShell for iPad 2, a shock-absorbent foam frame that wraps around the device and prevents damage from drops and rough play.  Available at Best Buy and medgestore.com, the SuperShell is ideal for home and classroom settings, as well as industries where the iPad 2 is at risk, including construction sites, hospitals, and sporting events. The SuperShell is made with ultra-protective closed-cell foam that wraps...

Got an email from Alastair Scott about this. There was absolutely no notice of this, but it has appeared on W H Smith's Web site: Unfortunately, the price is ridiculous. £169, even with 20% VAT included, bears no relation to $129 in the US - and I suspect that that will have to come down given the pricing of the new Kindles. The picture is from the WHSmith site and you can find it here....

It’s a little weird to begin every post I make about the company this way, but the saga of e-news copyright troll Rights Haven’t, I mean Righthaven, keeps getting better and better. First came the news that a Colorado court has thrown out the first Righthaven case to be thrown out outside of Nevada. The reason given was the same as in the Nevada cases: lack of standing to sue, because the Righthaven rights agreement wasn’t valid for that purpose. Furthermore, the Colorado judge ordered Righthaven to reimburse the defendant’s legal fees. And speaking of paying defendants’...

I was considering mentioning this xkcd comic strip on the evils of DRM the other day, but didn’t think it was really worth bringing up on its own. However, my friend Eric A. Burns has posted a most cogent analysis of the strip on his blog Websnark.com, and I do think that’s worth mentioning. The strip has to do with a tree that has a USB port embedded in it, offering an e-book copy of the Shel Silverstein book The Giving Tree—except that, due to DRM, the people who download it can’t read it and “lending is not enabled”....

I’m not sure I follow this story, but if it’s true it could be important for the burgeoning Android device market. The blog Paris Lemon points to a story that’s been buried under today’s spate of Kindle news: Microsoft just issued a press release concerning a patent portfolio cross-licensing partnership it just signed with Samsung. Included in the press release is the sentence, “Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will receive royalties for Samsung’s mobile phones and tablets running the Android mobile platform.” Paris Lemon points out that this means that of the three major Android OEMs,...