Digital Podcast» Digital Podcast | Amazon

Warner Music Now DRM Free at Amazon

Alex Nesbitt — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:51:12 +0000

Wired is reporting that Warner Music Group began selling music on Amazon in the MP3 format without digital rights management protection. Amazon has added all of WMG’s digitized music catalog to the store.

Amazon’s store now contains over 2.9 million tracks, all in the unprotected MP3 format and including music from three of the world’s four major labels. EMI and Universal are already providing music to the DRM free store.

This should be a great benefit to consumers who are confused about DRM and frankly don’t want to know about it. Hopefully it will also help Amazon build a stronger competitor to iTunes and drive innovation.

[tags]Amazon mp3, music, Warner Music Group, DRM[/tags]

Amazon Releases Kindle e-book Reader

Alex Nesbitt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:39:00 +0000

Amazon introduced its $399 Kindle portable e-book reader device, and a library of more than 90,000 books available for download through the Kindle Store for about $9.99 each.

One nice feature of the Kindle is its ability to connect to a wireless network through a new service called Amazon Whispernet, which enables content downloads without a PC or Wi-Fi hotspot.

Pricing of newspaper subscriptions are $5.99 to $14.99 per month, Kindle magazines are $1.25 to $3.49 per month, and wireless delivery of blogs starts at 99 cents each per month.

The Kindle includes storage capacity for up to 200 books, and supports standard SD memory cards as well; battery life is pegged at about 48 hours with the wireless feature on, and a week or more with wireless connectivity disabled.

Here’s the affiliate link if you want to buy Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device.

The device is getting incredible buzz around the blogs and in mainstream media and that’s good for Amazon. Many of the features on the Kindle seem great and while I haven’t seen the device myself it probably is pretty cool (and the affiliate cash certainly helps raise interest among the bloggers).

However, it seems like a lot of money for an electronic book reader and I have a hard time seeing it gaining serious volume at that price point. Maybe if they gave it away like cellphones and sold me a subscription to books it might have a chance, but I can’t see paying this kind of money for a Kindle.

[tags]Amazon, ebooks, Kindle[/tags]

Amazon mp3 Store Beta Launches

Alex Nesbitt — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:04:46 +0000

Amazon.com now offers MP3 downloads through the Amazon MP3 store, which has over 2 million songs available in MP3 format. The MP3s are encoded at 256 kbps, which means they’re high quality audio MP3s. There is no DRM so you can listen on any device.
And the price is right with full albums as low as $4.99 and tracks as low as $0.89.

It does require that you install a downloader, which worked fine for me. The tool handles the download and then your music is automatically pushed onto your iTunes or Windows Media Player library.

Here’s a video of the system in action.

[tags]amazon mp2, drm free music[/tags]