First shoes, now diapers. Amazon is reportedly about to announce on Monday the acquisition of Quidsi, the New Jersey-based ecommerce company behind Diapers.com, Soap.com, and, most recently, BeautyBar.com. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who broke the story from a maternity ward in Boston where his daughter was just born (no joke), puts the price of the all-cash deal at $540 million. A year ago, Amazon bought online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion.

Founded by Vinit Bharara and Marc Lore, Quidsi has raised a total of $78.5 million. Its most recent funding was a $20 million debt round last April from investors including Accel, Besssemer, MentorTech, and New Enterprise Associates.

Diapers.com is the company’s flagship brand, with an estimated $300-million revenue run rate this year. Soap.com just launched in June, and BeautyBar.com launched last week. So the vast majority of revenues is still coming from Diapers.com, which would value the deal at less than 2X revenues. Feeling threatened, Amazon recently started undercutting Diapers.com on price, a strategy which may have helped convince them to sell.

If the deal goes through, it would just go to show that you can still build an ecommerce startup if you go after the right niche. But it would also prove that if you get big enough, Amazon will notice and either buy you or try to squash you.

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Amazon Buys A Lot of Diapers.com For $540 Million

Amazon has just released a new free iPad app, called Amazon Windowshop that the company says is a complete “rewrite” of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Optimized for touch screen tablets, Amazon Windowshop makes it easy to swipe through the store to browse products on the iPad.

Similar to Amazon’s website, the app features product lists including “Featured”, “Bestsellers”, “Recommendations”, “New Releases”, “Most Wished For”, “Most Gifted”, and “Movers & Shakers”.

Amazon presents products via a grid-like interface, but will include pop-outs of specific products with high-resolution images, user reviews, descriptions and videos related to that product (which includes 30 second samples for the music items).

For Amazon Prime members, the app will indicate which products qualify for Amazon Prime and include Amazon 1-Click checkout. You can also share products from the app via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, save an item for later by adding it to your Wish List, and more.

Essentially the app is a suped up version of Amazon.com that is designed specifically for the iPad. It almost feels like a catalog, because of the layout and images. As the holiday season draws near, Amazon is undoubtedly ramping up its online shopping offerings, and capitalizing on the continued growth in the the consumer use of the iPad.

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Amazon Launches Brand New iPad Shopping App Called Windowshop

When it comes to buying music online, there’s iTunes, which is ahead by a mile, and then there’s everyone else. According to a recent report published by Billboard, iTunes accounts for 26.7% of US music sales, making it the top ranked music vendor in the United States, including physical retailers like Walmart and Best Buy. Amazon accounts for a respectable 7.1% of the market, but its digital download service — which competes directly with iTunes — only represents a meager 1.3% share (the rest is from physical CD sales). But we’re hearing Amazon is looking to turn things around.

We’re hearing from one source that Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked, we’ve heard.

Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new).

Amazon’s MP3 store has been available in a public beta since September 2007, and made waves in 2008 by becoming the first online music vendor to sell songs without DRM (iTunes eventually followed). It comes pre-installed on Android phones as a native application (which works quite well), but its desktop website has a pretty poor user experience compared to iTunes.  Look for Amazon to try to get its store integrated in as many places as possible later this year and early next year — given its past association with Android, it’s even possible that Amazon may be involved with the Google iTunes Competitor that was previewed at Google I/O.

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Amazon’s MP3 Store On Hiring Spree, May Be Planning Major Relaunch

The Archos 7 Home Tablet already went up for pre-order overseas last month, but it's now finally available to order over here as well courtesy of Amazon, with more retailers undoubtedly set to follow soon. While there's still no word on an exact release date (Archos has only said the "end of April"), the 7-inch tablet can now be ordered for $199.99, which is one of the more inexpensive ways to get a taste of Android without having to sign a contract. Still not sure what you might be getting into? Then be sure to check out our hands-on for a quick overview of the device.

[Thanks, Ron]

Archos 7 Home Tablet up for pre-order on Amazon for $199 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Archos 7 Home Tablet up for pre-order on Amazon for $199

There’s been a lot of hoopla the past week over Amazon’s fight with book publisher Macmillan. The main issue is that Macmillan wants higher prices for its e-books, while Amazon wants to keep prices down for its Kindle device. Amazon went as far as to pull all of Macmillan’s books from its store, but quickly admitted that they’d eventually have to give in to Macmillan’s demands. Why? Well the obvious answer is Apple, whose new iPad device with its iBooks Store is allowing publishers to set higher prices. But don’t forget Amazon’s other rivals too.

One reader wrote in to tell us how he was looking for The Politician, a new book by Andrew Young about John Edwards. The book, which is published by Macmillan, is not available on Amazon.com right now due to the dispute. When the man noticed that he turned to Amazon rival Barnes & Noble for the book — and from the looks of it, he’s not alone. The book is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Noble’s entire site. On another rival’s site, Borders, it’s the number five best seller.

Pressure from Apple aside, Amazon can’t afford to blackball these publishers because people can so easily turn elsewhere to get the book. Even though it’s not available on Amazon, The Politician is still the number 49 best seller on the site through partner sellers — even though they’re selling the book for significantly more than Barnes & Noble or Borders (or than Amazon would if it were available through them).

[thanks Shmuel]

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The Other Winner In Macmillan v. Amazon: Barnes & Noble

A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that it will be “capitulating” to Macmillan by selling the publishers’ books for their desired prices.

Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon basically banned titles, both paper and digital, published by Macmillan by refusing to directly sell them. And Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing.

Amazon is now giving into Macmillan’s demands because of the publisher’s monopoly over its titles. In a passive aggressive manner, Amazon says that readers will decide whether it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for e-books. And that other publishers will compete by offering their books and lower prices.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said last week that publishers were unhappy with Amazon’s pricing mode, foreshadowing this disagreement with Macmillan. Jobs revealed that publishers are withholding their titles from Amazon because of Amazon’s pricing model. Jobs also said that prices for books on Apple’s new tablet device, the iPad, will be the same as Amazon’s pricing.

Here is Amazon’s announcement:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Amazon Caves To Macmillan’s eBook Pricing Demands

The Kindle bits were all part of Amazon's annual post-holiday statistical breakdown, so in case you're wondering, besides Kindle, the company is claiming its other top-selling electronics were the 8GB iPod Touch and Garmin nuvi260W, and in the wireless department the honor goes to Nokia's unlocked 5800 XpressMusic, Plantronic's 510 Bluetooth headset, and AT&T's edition of the BlackBerry Bold 9700.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Kindle most gifted item in Amazon's history, e-books outsell physical tomes on Christmas Day originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kindle most gifted item in Amazon’s history, e-books outsell physical…

The de facto place to buy Kindle books is, of course, Amazon. Given how tightly this allows Bezos & Co. to manage things we're guessing this is how the company would like to keep it, but there may be direct-to-kindle competition brewing from an unlikely source: Scribd. The site, which started off as a place to dump and share random documents, has been following the YouTube path and is now and selling access to fully copyrighted works. Many of those works are downloadable as text, Word, or PDF documents, meaning Kindle users can already work some conversion magic and get them on their devices. But, according to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, straight to Kindle distribution is next. The question is: will they be for-pay titles, or only the billions of pages of free content the site offers? Places like Feedbooks and Gutenberg.org let you download free content direct to the Kindle already, but we're not aware of anyone selling content straight-to-Kindle yet -- other than Amazon, of course.

Scribd positioning self to become Amazon competitor, sell books on Kindle? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scribd positioning self to become Amazon competitor, sell books on…

The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and modifiers.

The Nook retails for $259, and is an Android-powered device with built in AT&T 3G service and WiFi, along with an e-ink screen that is found in most other readers. The instructions for rooting the device require that the device is opened up and that the SD card which stores the operating system be removed. The process seems a little too simple, almost as if the device was designed to be hacked. The storage is on a removable card, which can then be loaded in another machine where the process of acquiring root access to the operating system is carried out.

This will likely lead to DRM controls being bypassed, and a slew of homebrew projects being created based on the hardware – which might ironically help Barnes & Noble in its bid to unseat both the Kindle and Sony e-Reader.

Full detailed instructions and photographs are available on the site here. The entire process is straight forward and only takes around 30-45 minutes. I might actually order a Nook now.

Tip via Nenad Nikolic (@shonzilla)

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Barnes and Noble Nook e-Book Reader Rooted

ASUS UL30Vt now available at Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS UL30Vt now available at Amazon

Want to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com’s international business? Because they’re definitely hiring a whole team, and they’re starting at the top.

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred.

Barnes & Noble is no Amazon, but it is a billion dollar company and they have an upcoming ebook reader that kicks the Kindle’s butt (it’s so easy to love unlaunched products, isn’t it?).

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Barnes & Noble Planning International Expansion

Well, we knew this was coming: Amazon's trying to convince a federal judge to block the $125m settlement that'll let Google Books make out-of-print works available online. According to Amazon's newly-filed brief, allowing the settlement will essentially force copyright holders into allowing Google to scan in and sell their works whether they want to or not -- a thorny area of the law Amazon's gotten pretty familiar with as it builds out the Kindle library. Of course, since the actual settlement is between Google and those very same authors and publishers, it certainly seems like Amazon is crying crocodile tears here -- according to our old friend Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild, "Amazon apparently fears Google could upend its plans" to make the Kindle the dominant ebook platform. Heady stuff -- and with more briefs against the settlement due in the next few days from heavy hitters like Sony, Yahoo and Microsoft, things seem like they're building to fever pitch. We'll keep you updated.

Read - USA Today
Read - CNET
Read - Amazon's brief [Warning: PDF]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Amazon formally protests Google Books settlement originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon formally protests Google Books settlement

If this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

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Say what you like about the Google Books Kool-Aid, but it tastes much…

You didn't have to read much of our recent Kindle DX review to get a handle on our opinions of the super-sized e-reader, but as you've likely gleaned from the headline, this one's not about us. Instead, we're asking you to chime in with your take on this here device during this week's How Would You Change. Did you really gain anything from the larger screen? Have you found it useful in your line of work / education? Are you down on the keyboard? Given Amazon's history, we can't imagine that the DX will stay in this form forever, and listen, wouldn't you want to have a say in what gets changed on Revision B? Drop your most intimate thoughts on the matter below -- who knows, maybe Sir Bezos is tuning in just to cash in on your two pennies.

Filed under: Handhelds

How would you change Amazon's Kindle DX? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 03:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How would you change Amazon’s Kindle DX?

Whether it’s a sign of economic recovery or just investment bankers getting ready to take off the month of August, there’s been a lot acquisition activity lately. In the last week alone, IBM purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, Amazon bought Zappos for $928 million, Sprint paid $483 million for Virgin Mobile, AdKnowledge paid $50 million for Super Rewards, and Yahoo picked up Xoopit for $20 million.

So far in July, the value of the acquisitions we track on CrunchBase totals $9.6 billion, which is nearly three times more M&A activity than the $2.6 billion we tracked in June. M&A exits already started to perk up in the second quarter , according to our latest CrunchBase report. But the increased deal flow on July suggests that corporate buyers are opening up their purse strings even more while acquisition prices are still relatively cheap.

But the bargains might not last. Already, the median acquisition price leaped up to $260 million in July, from $22 million in June. Most of that jump was due to some very big transactions such as the ones listed above, as well as Agilent’s $1.5 billion purchase of Varian and Bristol-Myers’ $2.1 billion acquisition of Medarex. Still, you know what they say about rising tides . . .

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M&A Activity Heats Up In July To $9.6 Billion