Could Amazon and Audible Rewrite Rules?
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Amazon could experiment in fascinating ways with its new acquisition, Audible.com. What if you could switch back and forth between an electronic book and the audio version?.
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Amazon.com has added songs from Warner Music Group to the range it sells as MP3 files without DRM (digital rights management), the companies said Friday.
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Just been doing some heavy translation from German to English. Which lead to writing a simple command line tool for translating via Google - waste time to save time in other words. Getting a prototype up from scratch took about 15 minutes (which sheds a light on blog spam I guess). Have cleaned it up a bit and dropping it here in case anyone can use it.
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Blog: Video-sharing site once plagued by copyright violations now features filtering system from Audible Magic.
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"Copyright officials recommended on Thursday that U.S. law be amended so that companies that rely on copyright infringement to make a profit can be held liable for their actions."  Which of course applies only to US companies.  Kazaa should be free and clear.  ...  Should have supplied a link.  I'm a BAD blogger!
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In the digital age, there are few black-and-white rules. Rather, we live in an era of gray when it comes to technology and the law.  A federal case that was recently dismissed before it reached trial is the latest example.
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Amazon has agreed to pay $300 million for audio book seller Audible.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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Amazon.com has begun a new chapter in its battle for customers&#39; ears: it has agreed to pay $300 million for Audible, a seller of audio books that has a close relationship with Apple.Ten-year-old Audible sells spoken-word content such as audio books, magazines, and radio programs through a number of channels, including its Web sites in the U.S. and U.K. It has 80,000 titles in its catalog, and a further 20,000 through partner sites in France and Germany.Amazon began reselling Audible&#39;s content in 2000, and since 2002, Audible has also distributed audio books through Apple&#39;s iTunes Store, when it became Apple&#39;s exclusive supplier of spoken-word content. Apple modified the software in its iPods to allow &quot;bookmarking&quot; of Audible audio files.This chapter in the battle for listeners may yet have a happy ending for Apple, as the Audible team plans to continue and grow its relationship with the iTunes Store, according to Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener. But that goes for Audible&#39;s many other channel partnerships too: &quot;We plan to continue and grow all these relationships,&quot; Herdener said.Apple declined to comment on the deal.The main battle front between Apple and Amazon remains the sale of digital music free of the restrictions imposed by DRM (digital rights management) systems, where Amazon has been competing with Apple in the U.S. since September.When Apple opened its iTunes Store, the music it sold was wrapped in a layer of DRM to prevent copying, which incidentally tied the music to Apple&#39;s iPod players and iTunes software.Some record companies were unhappy that Apple limited the sales to its players in this way, and last May&#160;Apple began offering tracks from EMI without DRM&#160;for a small premium, later bringing the price down to the same $0.99 it charges for other tracks with DRM.&#160;Amazon joined the fray&#160;in September, selling music from EMI and Universal in MP3 format, without DRM,&#160;adding tracks from Warner to its catalog&#160;in December. It now offers 2.9 million DRM-free tracks, compared to 2 million DRM-free tracks in Apple&#39;s iTunes Store. Apple offers millions more tracks with DRM.Audible&#39;s audio books are wrapped in a layer of DRM, which Amazon does not plan to remove unless customers start to complain, Herdener said.&quot;Each media marketplace has its own business dynamics,&quot; he said.Amazon recently moved into the electronic book market with the launch of its Kindle e-reader, a device for downloading and displaying electronic books. Kindle also plays audio files, including those sold by Audible, making it a (much bulkier) competitor to the iPod.The $300 million price tag for Audible includes the assumption of outstanding stock option obligations. The companies expect to close the deal by April.
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Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to pay $300 million for Audible, an audio books seller that has a close relationship with Apple Inc.
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Blog: Site once plagued by copyright violations now features filtering system from Audible Magic.
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Along with its library of 2 million songs, Amazon.com is bringing something else to the online music marketplace: competition. When it opened Sept. 25, Amazon's MP3 digital download store undercut iTunes' prices on many albums. Its tracks, most of which sell for 89 to 99 cents, have higher sound quality than standard iTunes tracks and come without copy restrictions - known as digital rights management - that make it difficult to move tracks to a variety of portable devices, including iPods and Windows Media players.
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Two new offerings this fall â including an electronic book reader from Amazon.com â will test if consumers are ready to leave the paper book behind.
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. said Thursday it will buy online audio book seller Audible Inc. for $300 million in a bid to expand its reach in digital audio content.
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Only five of 26 claims survive Most of the claims in Amazon's controversial patent for shopping with a single mouse click have been rejected by the US Patent Office. It follows a campaign by a New Zealander who filed evidence of prior art with funding from readers of his blog.â¦
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I spent a few days over the last week trying to get a connection between Frontier and Amazon's SimpleDB.  I got connections going with: CreateDomain, DeleteDomain, ListDomains. They all use the same basic code to handle authentication, and all three work. But I hit a dead-end with the PutAttributes call. At first I thought I had found a problem on their end, because their JavaScript scratchpad app (a life-saver) had exactly the same problem as my code. I got in touch with the Amazon people, they asked me to download a new version of the scratchpad app, and it worked, but of course my app still doesn't. I compared my parameter list to theirs, and except for the signature and time-stamp they are identical. So there's something wrong with my code, clearly.  Here's a link to a plain text listing of the code. All four of the interface routines use this code to call the Amazon web service. This is the place the problem almost certainly is.  And here's the interface for PutAttributes.  As often happens, the geeky readers of this blog may spot the mistake that I don't, so all suggestions are welcome. I really want to get past this and start building applications that connect with this new web service.
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Amazon.com was accused in a lawsuit of infringing a Cendant patent for a Web site feature that makes recommendations to consumers based on past purchases.