American company, Discovery Communications Inc – who are indeed the people behind the Discovery Channel – has accused Amazon of infringing patents covering electronic book delivery and security with its Kindle e-book reader and said the online retailer should be forced to pay royalties.

Discovery Patent Holdings filed the complaint Wednesday in Delaware’s federal district court (as a side note, never go to Delaware, a few outlet stores and a lot of empty space, I made that mistake, don’t follow me child). Anyway, in that complaint the company claims the infringement of two patents.

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Rumours are circulating across US media outlets that the Justice Department there is beginning to investigate Apple’s tactics in the digital music market. Staff members from the Department are already said have talked to major music labels and internet music companies, according to “several people briefed on the conversations”.

The anti-trust inquiry is in the early stages and the conversations have, according to the NY Times, “revolved broadly around the dynamics of selling music online.” Investigators were said had asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple used its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give Amazon.com exclusive access to music about to be released. Continue Reading

Amazon is to release an application to allow Android-based smartphone and tablet device owners to get in on its Kindle services at some stage during this summer.

If nothing else, we'll be curious to see how well it does...

At the moment, there are Kindle applications available for both Windows and Mac OS X, as well as Apple’s iPhone OS and BlackBerry. As with all of the above, the version of Amazon’s Kindle set to be made available for Android is to include Amazon’s much touted Whispersync, which allows for bookmarks to remain synchronised across multiple devices – should you read on your notebook and then pick up your phone, you should be able to pick up at exactly the same point.

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It seems that Amazon’s Kindle might not be quite the godsend to students that it’s been built up to be.

It's certainly the nicer of the Kindles, but it seems it's still not up to snuff

Amazon had been pushing its line of ebook readers as a replacement for the usual mountain of books and papers that students might need to carry around. While Amazon was quick to publicise the trial at the beginning of the academic year that would see university students replacing their various paper-based texts with its larger form ebook reader, the Kindle DX. Unfortunately, it seems that that trial hasn’t gone down too well with those students with a specific interest in using the device for academic reasons, rather than simply reading for pleasure.

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It’s been announced that Amazon is to add to its Kindle ebook reader a Facebook feature, which will give users the ability to maintain a connection to social networks via the device’s wireless.

Interesting to see how the E Ink display handles Facebook...

Indeed, this latest update to Amazon’s Kindle makes use of the one big feature of the Kindle that few, if any, other ebook readers boast, the persistent 3G connection. Indeed, it’s one of the features that’s made the Kindle so very attractive, offering instant access to Amazon’s Kindle Store on the go, and now the same service will be used to offer Kindle owners the ability to check their Facebook profiles for updates.

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Rarely a days goes past without a new lawsuit being hurled Google’s way and today it’s a group of US photographers, illustrators and other visual artists who have begun legal action regarding claims the search giant is scanning and displaying their work online without paying them.

Google is “exploiting the plaintiffs' copyrighted professional work without authorisation or compensation”.

The lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan federal court by the American Society of Media Photographers and others who were not permitted to join a $125 million class-action settlement over digitised books, which is pending in the same court. “The new lawsuit also seeks class-action status on behalf of photographers and illustrators whose works are contained in books covered by the earlier settlement,” reports Reuters.

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It seems that Random House could well be considering keeping its content away from Apple’s iPad when the device eventually hits, for fear of sparking a price war across platforms.

Still no word on if and when we can expect to see iBooks in Europe...

According to the report coming from the Financial Times, Apple’s iBooks, which is to be rolled out with the iPad, has managed to secure the rest of the top five book publishers, including Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Harper-Collins and Penguin. The big fear, as with Amazon’s Kindle platform last year, is that Apple’s pricing setup might well see books move into a price war the likes of which they’ve not seen in a very long time.

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Digitimes has released a research document in which it claims that worldwide e-book reader shipments will reach 28 million by 2013. “Global e-book reader shipments will increase from 700,000 units in 2008 to 28 million units in 2013, representing a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 386%,” according to the report, which is available here, and is a snip for $500 (€374).

Sony and Amazon dominated the e-reader market in 2009, though this may be challenged in the next few years.

The document also indicated that the total market value for e-book reader shipments would surpass $3 billion in 2013, up from only $244 million in 2008.

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Amazon has taken the time to show off a little of what its upcoming Kindle apps for tablet devices will look like, unsurprisingly, it’s touting support for Apple’s iPad already.

Amazon's new Kindle arrangement does look lovely

Amazon seems dead set on spreading the Kindle platform so that the service touches just about ever major device possible, with the e-tailer pushing its Kindle applications out to the PC, Mac, iPhone, and BlackBerry already. Now though, the next big push seems to be one that makes, at the very least, a little more sense than making an ebook marketplace available to those platforms, and will see Amazon’s Kindle platform spread itself to a form factor on which books are, at least, a little more readable. Amazon has announced that it will be pushing the service out to “tablet computers.”

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Amazon has announced the availability of the Mac version of its Kindle for desktop application, widening the audience of the Kindle store even further.

Releasing on as many platforms as possible is suiting Amazon very well indeed...

Naturally, Amazon is pleased with the move, which brings access to the company’s vastly successful Kindle digital bookshop to just about every major platform going, and announcing that it hopes to make the Kindle shop available to those who pick up the iPad in the not too distant future. Of course, that’s barring any backlash from Apple, which has, in the past, raised issues with apps that “duplicate the functionality of the device” with the iPhone, something that could rear its head again with the iPads iBooks app.

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Micro-blogging service Twitter has announced that it’s making some interesting moves in the direction of integrating updates from the service with other, similarly styled services.

He's such a charming image for a service...

The latest update to the Twitter blog outlines the rollout of the Twtter updates across multiple different platforms, which allows for people to spread high quality content across multple services without too much difficulty. Indeed, it seems that Twitter’s ability to propagate and promote interesting content via either conversation or retweets, is one of the things on which the service is looking to capitalise. Twitter’s CEO, Ev Williams, announced the @Anywhere move at SXSW, saying of the move to push the service’s “hovercards” to anywhere you see a Twitter profile that,

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It seems that Amazon’s by now fairly infamous ‘one click’ patent has been upheld, and the web-based bookseller will be able to hand onto it for the time being.

Amazon's one click arrangement should see it very well indeed...

Word comes from TechFlash of the move, which sees Amazon’s sole right to the ‘one-click’ concept upheld, something that could very well see other web-based businesses very peeved indeed. For those who aren’t in the know, Amazon essentially owns the patent on the ability to offer customers a ‘one-click’ (hence the name) purchasing setup. Rather than users having to trawl through various bits and pieces, account information is saved from previous purchases and customers can, indeed, buy with a single click.

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