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Amazon Strongly Supports Enactment of Enzi-Durbin-Alexander Federal Online Sales Tax Bill Called “Marketplace Fairness Bill”

If you’re wondering where Amazon stands on the collection of sales taxes for your online purchases, here’s the scoop. Amazon issued a press release yesterday confirming its support for federal legislation introduced this morning by United States Senators Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., known also as the “Marketplace Fairness Act.”

The bill would close a legal loophole that allows online retailers to avoid paying state sales taxes that brick-and-mortar stores must remit. But the bill exempts online retailers with less than $500,000 in annual sales.

Amazon has opposed legislation in several states to collect online sales taxes because of the complexity created by a state-by-state approach.

“Amazon strongly supports enactment of the Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill and will work with Congress, retailers and the states to get this bi-partisan legislation passed,” said Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice-president of global public policy, in a statement. “It’s a win-win resolution — and as analysts have noted, Amazon offers customers the best prices with or without sales tax.”

Here’s the guts of Amazon’s press release:

SEATTLE, Nov 09, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today confirmed its strong support for the federal bill introduced this morning by United States Senators Enzi, Durbin, and Alexander, that would create a constitutional framework for collecting sales tax online.

“Amazon strongly supports enactment of the Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill and will work with Congress, retailers, and the states to get this bi-partisan legislation passed,” said Paul Misener, Amazon vice president, global public policy. “It’s a win-win resolution – and as analysts have noted, Amazon offers customers the best prices with or without sales tax.” 

 If enacted, the Enzi-Durbin-Alexander bill will allow states to require out of state retailers to collect sales tax at the time of purchase and remit those taxes on behalf of customers, and it will facilitate collection on behalf of third party sellers. Thus, this bill will allow states to obtain additional revenue without new taxes or federal spending and will make it easy for consumers and small retailers to comply with state sales tax laws.

The Scoop on the New Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Program, and An Important Commitment from Amazon: Free Kindle Book Offers Are Not Going Away

 

By Steve Windwalker

There has been a bit of confusion among Kindle owners today following Amazon’s launch of their new Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program, and we’ll do all we can here to help get it sorted out. I apologize for our phrasing that referred to the program initially as “Amazon’s new approach to free books,” and for the fact that there was a brief period when our Free Book Search Tool was returning some titles that were not free (in that they qualified only for free borrowing under the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program); that problem has now been addressed. Like the New York Times, we took a moment to get our heads around what was being launched.

Important note: For any readers who were charged for a book today due to confusion between free books and the new Kindle lending library program for Amazon Prime members, Kindle customer support is always glad to provide a no-hassle return and refund within 7 days of your purchase. You can contact them at http://amzn.to/tL7YwJ.

So, what’s the new program?

First, let me be as clear as I can be: the new Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program is not a replacement for Amazon’s free Kindle book offerings, and Kindle Nation Daily has received a direct answer from Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman today “confirming that we will continue to offer free books in the Kindle Store.”

Other than that very important fact, here’s the scoop on the new program:

This new addition to the $79 Amazon Prime package will add great value to what is already a terrific deal — a deal that I have been enjoying for several years. Here are some of the fine points for the lending program:

  • There are tons of great books available under this program, including over 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers.
  • This “lending library” program is limited to one book per Amazon account per month.
  • There do not, at present, appear to be any “due dates” or other limitations imposed on the length of time for which you can “borrow” these books, but you do have to return one book before you can download another under the program.
  • The program is limited to those readers who actually own a Kindle device — any Kindle device from the Kindle 1 to the Kindle Fire and anything in between or thereafter, but not the Kindle Apps for other devices such as computers and iPads. Indeed, at present you can only browse the listings for these books using a Kindle and you need to be on your Kindle to download a qualifying book when you find one that you like.

We’ll have a lot more to report on this in the days ahead, and you can count on us to do all we can to help you find books that you want to read at prices you can comfortably pay — including free!

For Amazon’s diagrams on how to use their new program, please visit the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library page.

Here’s the guts of Amazon’s press release this morning:

Introducing The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free – including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates

Books can be borrowed and read on all Kindle E Ink devices and Kindle Fire

 

SEATTLE, Nov 02, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Today, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced the launch of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free – including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers – as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebookstore offers such a service. With an annual Prime membership, the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is included at no additional cost. Millions of Prime members enjoy free two-day shipping, unlimited streaming of nearly 13,000 movies and TV shows, and now thousands of books to borrow for free with a Kindle.

 

“Owning a Kindle just got even better. Today, we’re introducing a new Prime benefit built for Kindle: The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Prime Members now have exclusive access to a huge library of books to read on any Kindle device at no additional cost and with no due dates.”

 

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library offers access to a wide array of categories and genres in fiction and non-fiction, and includes popular titles such as Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Big Short and Liars’ Poker by Michael Lewis, TheHunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen –plus award-winning books such as The Finkler Question and Guns, Germs, and Steel, memoirs such as Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Just as with any other Kindle book, your notes, highlights and bookmarks in borrowed books will be saved, so you’ll have them later if you purchase or re-borrow the book. Books are borrowed from a Kindle device, and customers can have one book out at a time. When customers want to borrow a new book, any borrowed book can easily be returned right from their device.

 

Titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library come from a range of publishers under a variety of terms. For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee. In some cases, Amazon is purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader under standard wholesale terms as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.

 

“The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a great new benefit for Kindle owners and an entirely new growth opportunity for authors and publishers,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. “With the growth in Prime membership and the recent addition of Prime Instant Video, we’ve been able to broaden our relationships with movie and TV studios such as CBS, Fox, and NBCUniversal and significantly increase their revenue. We’re excited to expand that investment to books – with this launch, we expect three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenues will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks.”

 

“We’re excited to offer titles from our ebook ‘Chapters’ series, which covers some of the world’s most popular destinations, to members of Kindle Owners’ Lending Library,” says John Boris, EVP Lonely Planet. “Our ebooks have done incredibly well on Kindle and this is a great way to showcase our travel expertise to an even broader audience.”

 

“We’re excited about any program that helps readers discover our authors and their books,” said David Nussbaum, Chief Executive and Chairman of F+W Media Inc. “We think this will lead to more people reading F+W’s books, and more profit for our authors.”

 

To learn more about the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, visit www.amazon.com/kindleownerslendinglibrary. To learn about all of the additional benefits included with Amazon Prime, or to start an Amazon Prime free trial visit www.amazon.com/prime.

Is It Apple Forcing Down Apple’s Hardware Prices, or Amazon?

Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of the Plan,” ran the headline for an interesting piece yesterday by Nick Wingfield of the New York Times.

Really?

Wingfield believes that Apple, “once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader,” is carrying out a major strategy change to the point where it is now competing with, and often beating, its rivals on hardware prices.

I’ll have to admit that despite some interesting anecdotal pricing comparisons made by Wingfield, I’m not feeling him. Yes, Apple has certainly shown some signs that it is pulling back some on its hardware prices, and those prices could soon collapse by 30% or more due to forces entirely outside Apple’s control. We’ll get to that, but it is unlikely that such a collapse would reflect Apple’s strategy.

To conclude that Apple has a real commitment to competitive pricing in its corporate DNA, we’d have to see a lot more evidence of significantly  lower prices on mainstream hardware items like the iPad, the iPod Touch, and the various workhorse Macs (as opposed to boutique products like the MacBook Air or carrier-subsidized products like the iPhone.)

It could happen. But to suggest that Apple management will be in the driver’s seat applying the gas on such a strategic transformation is to ignore a number of powerful forces that leave Apple few options.

For starters, let’s look at the tablet market, which it is entirely fair
to say was created through the innovative brilliance of Apple and its
late leader Steve Jobs. The brilliant success of the iPad — both in its elegance and in its acquisition rate by the public — made fierce competition inevitable. So while iPad sales continue to grow dramatically quarter over quarter, iPad’s overall tablet market share fell from 95.5% a year ago to 66.6% in the third quarter of 2011, FierceWireless reported Friday. Nothing truly stunning there; it’s a pattern one could expect to see in any new market as it begins to mature.

A little more of a jaw-dropper is that the market share for the various Android tablets on the market — including devices from HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Acer and Dell — grew from 2.3% to 26.9% in the same period.

Now, in the fourth quarter of 2011, the Android market share is likely to grow even more dramatically with the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet, priced at $199 and capable, Amazon clearly believes, of doing everything an iPad can do except for the things that only a few people really care about.

If the Kindle Fire hits the hardware sweet spot once people have it in their hands, it could quickly become the single most coveted holiday gift for smart grownups this year at that $199 price, and that price and popularity would constitute a very powerful if traditional pressure on the $499-to-$829 iPad price structure.

But there is another set of pressures forming just now that could totally pull the rug out from under iPad prices. As we reported last week in our post Interested in Trading Up for a New Kindle Touch or Kindle Fire Tablet? Pull Your Clunker In to Amazon’s Super Lot, Amazon is now investing website real estate and an aggressive marketing campaign to create its own secondary marketplace for virtually all tablets and ebook readers. If Amazon can succeed at enticing thousands of the customers whom it shares with Apple to trade in their iPads and iPod Touches for the 30% to 40% offers now on the Amazon website, those trade-in units could stake Amazon or its “Warehouse Deals” subsidiary to an off-price inventory that might, in time, create an entirely new form of downward pricing pressure on Apple.

What’s really going on here? Obviously, an important part of Amazon’s motivation is to give its customers as much incentive as possible to buy its latest-model Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire units, and regardless of what you paid originally for an iPad it’s a compelling proposition to be able to trade it in now for a brand new Kindle Fire and actually have money left over.

But there could be another mission for Amazon, one that could well influence the economics, the retail pricing, and perhaps even the share price for a competitor such as Apple over the next few years. It’s easy at this point to think that Amazon’s new two-way hardware market will be dwarfed in scale by Apple’s front-door production and retail power.

But Amazon knows better than anybody the effects that its Amazon
Marketplace secondary market for new and used books had on competing
booksellers and publishers over the past decade. Some in the publishing
industry believe that Amazon’s customer-friendly innovations actually
destroyed billions of dollars in corporate wealth
, even if it also
fueled tens of thousands of small and often home-based businesses.

“Some companies,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, “do everything they can to raise prices for their customers. Other companies do everything they can to lower prices for their customers.”

It is clear that Amazon has always been the latter kind of company, and equally clear that Bezos feels that Apple has been the former kind of company both generally and in its activities with the Big Six publishers to create the “agency model” to fix ebook prices at higher levels than Amazon wanted to charge.

If Apple now seems to be in a state of transition from the former kind of company to the latter kind of company, it remains to be seen whether the transition is “all part of Apple’s plan” or, at least in some significant part, the result of an impressive array of economic pressures that Amazon’s innovations are bringing to bear on Apple.

Note: it happens every 90 days or so, and this afternoon Amazon will report its quarterly earnings after the close of the markets, with the usual conference call scheduled at 5 pm Eastern. Apple reported its earnings last week and apparently disappointed investors. Amazon may well do the same in the short term, but the company’s commitment to low margins could well be leading it to a promised land in which it could gain as much as 50% of the U.S. trade book market by 2013.

You Could Get Paid for Reading This: Interested in Trading Up for a New Kindle Touch or Kindle Fire Tablet? Pull Your Clunker In to Amazon’s Super Lot!

This is fascinating. But even better, you could get paid for reading this post. Sort of.

 

Back in May, we ran an article entitled “Amazon Prepares the Way for the Kindle Tablet by Accepting iPad Trade-ins.” At the time Amazon was offering $245 for my first-generation 32GB, wifi-only iPad, and we called it “an absolutely brilliant step that only it could have taken as a way of preparing the path for the Kindle tablet:”

It extended its relatively unknown Buyback program, previously associated mostly with textbooks, movies, and video games, to include a wide range of electronics products including the iPad, the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy, the Motorola Xoom, and all kinds of other devices that might — if you could trade them in for a decent sum — prepare the way for you to buy a Kindle tablet, both in terms of the need to replace functionality and the financial wherewithal to make the purchase. Click here to visit Amazon’s Trade-in site.

Now Amazon has taken the logical but equally brilliant next step by extending the buyback deal to just about every ebook reader and tablet that we have ever owned or dreamed of owning — except, at this early writing, the Nook — beginning with that first Kindle 1 for which you may, like me, have paid $399. As you can see at the right, Amazon’s algorithms initially set a “like new” trade-in price of $29 along with $26.25 (Good) or $18.50 (Acceptable), but those didn’t last long. It may be a good indication of how popular the trade-in program is the Kindle 1 trade-in offer has already, as of this morning, fallen to less than half the original levels at $12/$10.75/$7.

These prices are set not by humans but by what Amazon’s algorithms make of the marketplace, and by Amazon’s formula for balancing the need to pay low enough that it can profit reasonably on a refurbished resale and high enough to make you want to unload the first-generation Kindle and buy a new model. But make no mistake, it’s all about setting you up with one of the new models if at all possible, because those new models — and especially the Kindle Fire tablet — are the ideal content- and commerce-delivery system for just about everything that Amazon sells.

As any auto dealer can tell you, there is a tremendous amount of market power involved in having what is effectively a two-way market, and of course Amazon is far more knowledgeable about relative price elasticity and inventory control than most auto dealers and manufacturers have proven themselves to be. For everyone who has been feeling that very common feeling of buyer’s remorse over having purchased less advanced but higher priced models in the past, even the prospect of a nickels-to-dollars trade-in transaction has to sweeten the appeal of purchasing a new Kindle Fire or Kindle Touch.

Meanwhile, for those who love to watch the ebook reader market and compare the popularity of various devices, it will be fascinating to watch the rising and falling offer prices for over 140 devices (including dedicated ebook readers, tablets, and smart phones) that Amazon has tagged with a “kindle” keyword in its trade-in department.

And meanwhile — as if this is something new — Amazon apparently has it all:

  1. the most popular ebook readers ever;
  2. the best value proposition for any tablet;
  3. the best trade-in spot, unless you are an eBay seller, for a growing list of electronic devices including dedicated ebook readers, tablets, and smartphones; and
  4. what is almost certain to become a very popular off-price secondary marketplace for the same devices.

Naturally, thus far we’ve all focused primarily on #1 and #2 above. But we should not underestimate the importance of #3 and #4 in influencing the economics, the retail pricing, and perhaps even the share price of some major competitors, including eBay and Apple.

But more on that in another post.

While We Wait for the Kindle Fire Tablet, Amazon Whets Our Appetites with More Fire-Optimized Content

By Steve Windwalker

I’m waiting for my Kindle Fire, along with thousands of other citizens of Kindle Nation. It’s supposed to arrive on November 16, but wouldn’t we love it if Amazon surprised us by shipping the Fire tablet a few days early?

In the meantime Amazon continues to whet our appetites by teasing us with the content that will soon be available on the Kindle Fire, including new PBS programming announced this morning in an on-sire letter from Jeff Bezos and an Amazon press release, programming that will be free to Amazon Prime members through Prime Instant Video:

Prime members will have access to more than 1,000 episodes of popular
PBS television, which will roll out on the service over the next several
months. PBS titles will include NOVA, Masterpiece and Antiques
Roadshow
, along with the Ken Burns series of documentaries featuring The
Civil War
, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Baseball,
Jazz and the acclaimed new series Prohibition, which
premiered on PBS stations earlier this month. Prime instant video will
also offer popular PBS news programs with day-after air availability
from shows like Frontline and Washington Week. Beginning
in early November, and for the first time ever on digital video, PBS
brings Prime members 200 episodes of The French Chef with the
world renowned Julia Child. 

Amazon Prime, just in case it’s new to you, combines free two-day delivery of millions of items in the Amazon Store with free instant streaming of thousands of video movies and programs, all for an annual rate of $79 or a free introductory month with your Kindle Fire. Learn more here.

So while I work this morning, with no Kindle Fire tablet yet to be found in my home, the first episode of Ken Burns’ Prohibition, which I missed last weekend, is playing on the MacBook Pro on my desk. When it’s finished I’ll probably switch over to listen to some music on the Cloud. But I’m counting the days (28, I think) before the Fire ships, not only because it will make the process more seamless and enjoyable but because the Fire will take its place alongside an e-Ink Kindle as my go-to device for video, music, newspapers and magazines, apps for productivity and fun, and sometimes even reading. 

For starters, Amazon is already teasing a very compelling three-month free trial offer for Kindle Fire-optimized magazines, available only to Kindle Fire owners,  that is bound to lead to millions of magazine subscriptions on the new device almost immediately on November 16:


Stay tuned for more, including a new initiative from Kindle Nation itself whose aim will be to help you explore all the new pathways and portals that the Kindle Fire tablet will help to open for your brain.

Here’s Jeff’s letter on the Amazon website this morning:

 

 

Now Available on Kindle: A Kindle Fan’s Report from the Front Row At Amazon’s NYC Press Conference, by Len Edgerly

by Len Edgerly
5 stars – 3 Reviews
Lending and Text-to-Speech: Enabled

 

We were very grateful last week when podcaster extraordinaire Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles agreed to live-blog the Kindle Fire/Kindle Touch press conference for Kindle Nation readers. Our gratitude remains, but not it is matched by great admiration for Len’s accomplishment in bringing out a short-form Kindle ebook version of his reportage and thoughtful commentary less than a week after the event. It’s a worthy addition to every Kindle library, and at 99 cents it will not cut deeply into your Kindle budget.

Here’s the set-up, directly from Len:

In this 30-page article, I invite you to join me in the front row at Amazon’s press conference in New York city on September 28, 2011. That’s when Jeff Bezos introduced the next generation of Kindles, including the Kindle Fire tablet. Just being at the event was a major thrill for a book lover whose life has been changed by the Kindle. I thought I’d seen the future when I bought a Rocket eBook in 1998. That didn’t work out too well, but the Kindle in 2007 looked like the real thing.

The next year, I started a weekly podcast, The Kindle Chronicles, to participate in the revolution in reading that I was sure would follow. Since then, I’ve interviewed 165 people representing all parts of the Kindlesphere–from Amazon executives to nervous writers, from technologists to school administrators, from the editor of the New York Times Book Review to my wife Darlene, who reads three times as many Kindle books as I do but is an endearing skeptic about technology.

I traveled by train to New York City worried that Amazon executives might get so excited about their shiny new color tablet that they would forget to keep improving the monochrome e-ink Kindles. In the event, I need not have worried. Jeff Bezos started the press conference by telling the Kindle story in a way that touched me as highly personal and revealing. Come join me in the front row, and I’ll show you what I mean.

They’re Here, and They’re Gamechangers! Amazon Announces Four New Kindles at Stunning Prices, Including a $199 Kindle Fire Tablet, a $99 Kindle Touch and a New $79 Kindle Base Model

Kindle Family

  

By Steve Windwalker

September 30, 2011

Amazon held a press conference in New York Wednesday morning, and Kindle Nation was well represented by correspondent Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles, who provided our readers with a live blog of a truly dazzling event marked by the launch of four brand new Kindles — include the new Kindle Fire tablet — at prices that shocked us all.

There’s a lot of information to share with you, but we’re going to try to strip it down and proceed from the simple to the sublime, with links in this week’s Kindle Nation WEEKENDER to more information and video for those who want to read more.

In that spirit, let’s begin with a very simple comparison chart for the hardware Kindle models that were unveiled Wednesday:

 

COMPARING THE NEW KINDLES

Model Kindle* Kindle Touch* Kindle Fire
Price $79.00 $99/$149 $199.00
Connectivity Wi-Fi $99 Wi-Fi Only; $149 Free 3G+Wi-Fi Wi-Fi
Release Date Available now 11/21/2011 11/15/2011
Covered by 30-day no-hassle return policy Yes Yes Yes
Content Millions of

books, newspapers,

magazines, games,

and docs

Millions of

books, newspapers,

magazines, games,

and docs

18 million movies,

TV shows, apps,

games, songs,

books, newspapers,

audiobooks,

magazines, and docs

Web browser Experimental

browser

Experimental

browser

Amazon Silk

cloud-accelerated

browser

Display 6″ E Ink Pearl 6″ E Ink Pearl 7″ Vibrant Color IPS
Text-to-Speech No Yes No
Battery Life 1 month 2 months 8 hours continuous reading or

7.5 hours

video playback

Cloud storage Free for all

Amazon content

Free for all

Amazon content

Free for all

Amazon content

Dimensions 6.5″ x 4.5″

x 0.34″

6.8″ x 4.7″

x 0.40″

7.5″ x 4.7″

x 0.45″

Weight 5.98 ounces 7.5/7.8 ounces 14.6 ounces
Interface 5-way controller multi-touch multi-touch
*Models with Special Offers Kindle Kindle Touch Not yet
*Prices with Special Offers $79.00 $99/$149 Not yet
*Models without Special Offers Kindle Kindle Touch Kindle Fire
*Prices without Special Offers $109.00 $139/$189 $199.00