Amazon MP3 Downloads Finally Get Songs

My dream has been realized. A few short months after the release of Amazon's foray into the music market, they have inked deals with Warner, EMI, Universal, and now Sony-BMG. Now they have a virtual corn-u-copia of DRM-free music for your perusal. What's the catch, you ask? Well, it seems that Amazon has also made a deal with physical stores to offer pre-paid cards to download certain items available from Amazon. No word if they'll restrict specific albums or songs for sale only in retail stores, but it will probably happen, if I know my greedy brick-and-mortar retailers correctly.

Amazon Kindle Goes Kaput. The Beginning Of Something Big?

A very unfortunate man has submitted this picture to CrunchGear. It seems that with little to no use, much less abuse, the screen of his girlfriend's Amazon Kindle is gradually deteriorating. It could be just a isolated problem, or it could be the start of something a little more serious. When the man informed Amazon, they said that they were aware of the problem and would send a new one as soon as the backorders are filled. So, if you own a Kindle, you should probably start watching out.

Wizardry: Rare J.K. Rowling Book Sold For $4 Mil

Amazon.com flexed their check-writing muscle recently buy purchasing one of seven handmade copies of J.K. Rowling's compilation of fairy tales, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Here's a little bit from Amazon's bragging page.

We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

If you take a look at the pictures of the actual book, the cover and illustration designs look pretty morbid, so who knows what the pages hold.

Amazon to Release E-Book Reader Monday

Hey, do you remember the Sony Reader I talked about earlier? You don't? You guys are going to have to start remembering these things.

Anyway, Amazon is about to get in on the lucrative e-book business with their new Kindle e-book reader.

CNet reports that it's equipped with wi-fi in order to connect to the Amazon e-book store to quench your thirst for books. The price tag is expected to be about $399, so it's still to friggin' expensive, considering you could buy a Palm Z22 that can do the exact same thing, or a beefier model for more reading. I sure hope this does better than the Sony Reader, but I heavily doubt it.

Amazon MP3 Downloads: THE Music Store For Linux

I just now delved deeper into Amazon's new music store, which I mentioned a few days ago, and I was quite impressed with my experience.

I made my first purchase One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head. Yes, I'm an 80's kind of guy. I'm probably the only man under the age of 18 in Cooke County, Texas who has Fleetwood Mac, The Pretenders, AND Haddaway on my iPod. C'mon, I challenge you.

Anyway, buying was simple and quick. I just clicked on the buy button, passed up the MP3 downloader software offer, and then was taken to a screen where I could download my song. Once I downloaded it, I loaded it to my iPod and listened to it in all of it's high-bitrate, non-DRM, sickeningly-over-the-top synthesizer goodness.

Oh, and did I mention that I did all of this in Linux?

Uh-huh. Because of the lack of DRM, and the help of some special applications, I was able to take the downlaoded song and sync it to my iPod with no fuss.

What do you think I paid for this little gem of a song? $1.99? Nope. Unlike iTunes Plus, this song only cost me 89 cents. Pretty sweet, huh?

The only downside to using Amazon MP3 with Linux is that if you want to buy a whole album, you're out of luck, as you'll have to download the Windows/Mac OS X compatible downloader client. I'm sure you could get it running in Wine, but I haven't had the chance to try. For now, I'll just have to download my music singularly.

So for anyone looking for a new music store, especially the Linux crowd, you need to take a look at this place. iTunes might want to keep an eye out for these guys.

Amazon MP3 Will Be A Winner...If It Has Songs

I haven't had the chance to actually download a song from them yet, but the Amazon MP3 store looks pretty promising.

Released to the public just a few days ago, Amazon has made quite a contender for the iTunes Store.

The number one selling point with Amazon is its DRM-free music. That's right. When you download it, it's yours. No strings attached. Sure, Apple has DRM-free songs with EMI, but that's the problem. It's from EMI.

The interface looks pretty good. It's pretty much typical Amazon fashion, and I've heard both good and bad reviews of their Music Downloader software that's required to download from the service. I'll try it out and give my two cents on it soon.

Amazon's done a great job so far, but the big thing that needs to be done is what will make or break the service. Selection. There isn't much of it now, but soon they should grab the attention of the big labels.