Is there anything Amazon doesn’t want to do? Last week in the UK Amazon snapped up LoveFilm and this week Amazon plans major expansion into online fresh food and groceries.

The FT is reporting that in the US the online retailer is developing a free weekly home-delivery service for everything from alcohol to fresh fruit and veg. Read More »

Does one have to win? It’s a good question. I love my books. I like piles of them in my flat. I may not read them again, but it’s nice to have them.

The Amazon Kindle is also great and growing on me — and the launch of its Kindle ebook lending service will surely boost that. I was chatting to parental friends surprised that some of them were very keen on getting one as well. That seems to show it has real cross generation appeal and so powerful growth that could really damage the book market. Read More »

The new Kindle 3G ebook reader has become’s Amazon’s best-selling product ever. They haven’t released the figures yet but say it has overtaken Harry Potter and the Deathly Halllows, which saw 1 million pre-orders when it was released in 2007.

First going on sale at the end of August 2010, the Kindle 3G should make sales of 8 million by the end of the year, a figure which will not go unnoticed by Apple, whose iPad has sold 12 million since its release back in March.

If you got one for Christmas you’ve probably been discussing its merits with relatives and friends.

Half of them will be impressed by the opportunity to store up to 3,500 books in one small tablet and read them on a screen without straining your eyes; the other half will wave a well-thumbed novel in your face and shout about the death of publishing and say there’s nowt wrong with a real book with pages you can turn with your fingers. Read More »

When I first saw coverage of this story on Techcrunch this morning, I had to check the date wasn’t April the 1st. Sadly, the headline is true – over-night a self-published guide called “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure” entered the top 100 on Amazon.com – and, no surprise, the retailer then pulled the title from the website as Twitter users, Techcrunch and other media outlets began to whip-up a understandable storm of controversy and started a boycott on Facebook. Read More »

Since the advent of social media, there’s a lot of talk about engagement marketing. I like the term “engagement marketing”, as it describes the interaction with customers on an adult to adult level as well as the realisation that the customer is part of the brand. But – besides the fact that marketing was always about customer centricity – remember the move from the 4Ps (Promotion, Place, Price, Product) to the 4Cs (Communication, Convenience, Cost, Customer Solution) – a lot of companies misunderstand the meaning of engagement marketing. Read More »

This could be interesting, Amazon says that in an update to its Kindle e-reader device it is going to allow readers to share their ebooks.

That is so cool. That’s what real book are all about and what (at the moment) ebooks lack – they lack lendability. Read More »

One of the biggest venture-capital firms of Silicon Valley today announced a $250 million fund created for social-media investments, called the sFund. Read More »

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, described The Times paywall as a “foolish experiment” that “would not last” and predicted that Rupert Murdoch would be forced to give up on the idea. Read More »

It’s not just Gillian McKeith who has been giving some unwitting but valuable lessons in how not to use social media. Now an historian, Orlando Figes, has agreed to pay libel damages to two other historians whose books were criticised by Figest via the Amazon review system.

Amazon: challenge of fake reviews

Figes’s case was quite extreme – not just saying that he didn’t like a book, but rubbishing the work and also mentioning how much better his own was, all while using an anonymous log in. Read More »