Nielsen Shows Kindle Unlimited Users Buy More Books

Will Amazon's Unit Growth Bottom Out in Q2?

There's not a whole lot that Wall Street dislikes right now about Amazon, which is heading into its second-quarter earnings report today after markets close. Investors have pushed the online retailer's stock price to record heights in recent weeks - more than $309 a share, and a market cap of $140 billion at one point - before backing off slightly to see Amazon close out Wednesday's after-hours trading at about $300 a share.

Despite the good vibes, there are problem areas. The company's year-over-year growth of units sold has been decelerating, for example, which could be worrisome if it continues.

J.P. Morgan's Doug Anmuth wrote in a research note that he is expecting some stabilization in the decelerating trend, but noted that, "we ... believe sub-30% would be concerning to investors." The launch of the Kindle in some giant new markets, such as India and China, could put the trend of deceleration to an end in the second half of the year.

Wall Street will also be keeping a close eye on the company's international business, especially after eBay cited macroeconomic softness in Korea and parts of Europe when it reported earnings last week.

Investors will also likely look for some commentary on the same-day and next-day AmazonFresh grocery delivery business, which, after five-plus years of experimentation solely in Seattle, recently started serving the Los Angeles area. If Amazon can figure out how to at least break even on that resource-intensive business, it will likely then load up the delivery vehicles with higher-margin, higher-cost products.

But it will be a costly build-out, and could impact margins negatively in the short term. Similarly, fulfillment-center expansion and price cuts on AWS offerings could also drag down margins.

Amazon is forecasting revenue of $14.5 billion to $16.2 billion, with analysts expecting the company to register earnings per share of four cents to six cents on $15.7 billion in revenue.

Amazon's Q2 Is a Miss

JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages

First quick look at Amazon's earnings numbers, and it's a miss.

The online retail giant posted a loss, at an EPS of minus two cents on revenue of $15.7 billion.

Though Amazon's net sales rose 22 percent compared to the year-ago quarter, it's a disappointing miss against analysts' expectations that the company would post earnings per share of four cents to six cents on $15.74 billion in revenue.

"This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products - Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content," CEO Jeff Bezos said in a canned statement. (Of course, with no actual sales numbers on the amount of Kindle products sold - as always.)

Not a ton of color in this release as to why Amazon missed, nor are there any notes on AmazonFresh, the company's experimental grocery delivery service. Hopefully, CFO Tom Szkutak will address these points on the conference call with analysts coming up shortly.

Shares of Amazon were trading off around two percent on the news, at around $297 per share.

New Kindle Paperwhite Is a Snappier, More Capable E-Reader

There's a new Kindle in town: The Kindle Paperwhite. This latest product in Amazon's line of basic monochrome e-readers has some welcome improvements over last year's Paperwhite, including a faster processor and a nicer screen.

But since it's not a blow-your-mind upgrade, Kindle lovers might be wondering whether it's worth an upgrade. And e-reader newbies may wonder what the difference is between this one - which starts at $119 - and the $69 entry-level Kindle.

I've been using the new Kindle Paperwhite for the past week, reading mostly media theory and economics books, which means I use it for less than an hour a night before I fall asleep. My conclusion is that it's probably not a must-have for people who are perfectly happy with their 2012 Paperwhite, but it is very tempting. Overall, the new Paperwhite is an excellent product.

It's a little bit snappier than the 2012 version. The front-lit E-ink screen doesn't have the "shadows" that plagued some of last year's Paperwhites, including the one I have. And I like the new features that help you recover your place more quickly, as well as Vocabulary Builder, which creates flash cards of the word you look up using the Web-based dictionary.

In deciding whether to purchase this e-reader for yourself it might help to first understand the Amazon Kindle product line.

There are currently two different Kindle e-readers being sold: The "regular" Kindle and this Kindle Paperwhite, which replaces last year's model.

Then there are variations within those two products: Wi-Fi-only models, those with both Wi-Fi and 3G, those with ads, and those without. Both have monochrome E-ink screens but the Paperwhite has a glow-y screen so you don't have to shine a light on it to read in the dark.

Also, the regular Kindle has buttons, not a touchscreen; and it's significantly cheaper, starting at $69. (These shouldn't be confused with Amazon's separate Kindle Fire line, which consists of full-color tablets running apps.)

The new Kindle Paperwhite costs $119 for a Wi-Fi-only version with "special offers," which basically means that Amazon runs ads for books across the lock screen. Then the price jumps up to $189 for a Wi-Fi and 3G Paperwhite with special offers. Strip the special offers away for an ad-free e-reader and both of those models go up in price by $20.

The new Paperwhite measures the same as the previous one - 6.7 by 4.6 by .36 inches - and has a six-inch touchscreen display. It weighs 7.3 ounces, meaning that it's less than an ounce lighter than the 2012 Paperwhite, and when I held one in each hand, I really couldn't tell the difference. It has a smooth, rubberized coating, and feels durable.

On the left is the 2012 version of the Paperwhite. On the right, the new model.

It comes with two gigabytes of internal storage, storing around 1,000 books. At the bottom of the Paperwhite there is a power button, a status light and a micro-USB port for charging. There are no other buttons on the device.

When you fire up the Kindle, you see a row of options at the top of the screen, including home, back, lighting adjustment, settings and a shopping cart that takes you to the Amazon store.

This is, of course, so you can buy e-books on Amazon.com. (The Kindle app on iPad, which I also use regularly, doesn't have a purchasing option.) Amazon has around two million e-books available for download on Kindle, including 400,000 that are exclusive to the Kindle store. Users can also borrow a fraction of those e-books, provided that you're an Amazon Prime subscriber.

In my experience, three out of roughly a dozen books I've searched for in the past week weren't available on Amazon.com as a Kindle download.

Once I started reading I could see the difference between last year's version of the Paperwhite and this new one. My old Paperwhite has a strange "shadow" at the bottom of the display and in general can have a sort of uneven look. The new one looks brighter, the contrast of black and white is greater, and the best part - there are no shadows on the screen.

The new Paperwhite also has a faster processor. I noticed its speediness more when toggling through the icons at the top of the screen - tapping the home button, searching, going into settings - because everything just felt more responsive. I didn't notice it quite as much with page turns. If it is faster, it might be fractions of a second faster. Books also downloaded very quickly.

There are a handful of new or improved features that Amazon is boasting about with this Paperwhite, but I'll focus on three key ones: Page Flip, In-Line Footnotes and Vocabulary Builder.

Page Flip lets you skip around without losing your place. In-Line Footnotes lets you view a footnote from the page you're on in a pop-up window, instead of being catapulted to another part of the book. In my experience, In-Line Footnotes worked with some books, but not all. Vocabulary Builder, which appears in a drop-down menu from the settings tab, shows you flash cards for all the words you've searched for while reaching.

The good news about the new Paperwhite's battery is that it matches the battery of the old Paperwhite, even while running on a more powerful processor. The battery will probably outlast Jeff Bezos's 10,000-year clock. Okay, not really, but Amazon said it can last up to two months with Wi-Fi turned off. After five nights of using the Kindle Paperwhite with Wi-Fi turned on, my battery had only dwindled to approximately 70 percent.

The bad news is that Amazon still isn't throwing a power adapter for wall outlets into the box, which means you could spend $15 extra on that.

A few more downsides: The Paperwhite doesn't have a headphone jack, and it doesn't support audio books through Audible. The "experimental browser" still feels like an experiment.

Also, and this is a small thing, but I really like that notes are auto-corrected when you're using the Kindle app for iPad. Conversely, on the Kindle e-reading devices, text isn't auto-corrected, which means I'm fat-fingering all sort of words that probably won't make sense to me later on.

Downsides aside, the new Kindle Paperwhite is a welcome improvement in the Kindle line.

Kindle Fire HDX: A More Helpful Tablet

What if you could summon a tech-support person to pop up in seconds in a live video on your digital device? And what if that person could draw on the screen or even take over the device to solve a problem?

Well, starting Oct. 18, you can do just that with the latest in Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet line, the Kindle Fire HDX. This help system, called the Mayday button, is the most unusual feature of what is otherwise a mainly evolutionary new model of the company's color tablets.

A better help system isn't exactly the prime reason to buy a new tablet. After all, tablets are supposed to be simple and easy to figure out. But Mayday is consistent with Amazon's long, well-earned reputation for customer support.

X-Ray for Music shows lyrics synchronized to the song playing on the Kindle Fire HDX.

I've been testing the Fire HDX, and it's a good, basic color tablet. This latest model, which starts at $229 for the 7-inch-screen version I used, is a definite improvement on last year's Fire HD, which started at $199 for the 7-inch version. (There's also a costlier, larger HDX version, with an 8.9-inch screen.)

Like earlier Fire models, it's best thought of as a hardware gateway to buying digital content from Amazon. The base model blasts ads at you from the home screen, but you can buy one without ads for $15 more.

However, the 7-inch Fire HDX, like its predecessor, still isn't as versatile or full-featured as rival tablets, like Apple's iPad mini or Google's Nexus 7. It offers only a fraction of the third-party apps available from the Apple or Google app stores. Among the missing are such popular offerings as Instagram, Dropbox, Google Maps, YouTube and Netflix (Amazon says a Netflix app is coming soon).

Unlike the mini or the Nexus, the 7-inch Fire HDX lacks a rear camera, so you can't easily show your surroundings to others during a video chat (the bigger model has a rear camera).

And the HDX has no equivalent to its rivals' voice-controlled, artificial intelligence features, Apple's Siri and Google Now.

And the Fire HDX turned in a so-so battery life of 7 hours that, while better than the 6 hours of the latest Nexus 7, paled before the iPad mini's 10 hours and 27 minutes. (I used my standard test where I set the screen to 75 percent brightness, keep the Wi-Fi on and play videos stored on the tablet until the battery dies.)

So, what makes the new Kindle HDX better than the last model? Well, it has a gorgeous, high-resolution screen that displays 323 pixels per inch, the same as the latest $229 Nexus 7, but much higher than the $329 iPad mini's 163 ppi (though the mini's screen is significantly larger, at 7.9 inches). The screen also was a bit more readable in sunlight than the iPad's. The Fire HDX has a faster processor that has eliminated the latency I encountered when testing last year's model.

The Fire HDX has a new operating system and some cool new features. The home screen still has a carousel to show recently used apps, songs, books and videos, but below that there's now a standard grid of icons for favorite apps and you can hide the carousel if you find it distracting. There's also a new sidebar for quickly switching among running apps. This appears when you swipe from the edge of the screen.

Perhaps my favorite new feature is called X-Ray for Music, which shows synchronized lyrics to the song you're playing. So far, it's only available on "tens of thousands" of Amazon's 25 million songs, starting with the newest and most popular. But I found scattered cases in songs going back to the 1970s and enjoyed using it.

The Fire HDX is slimmer and lighter than last year's model, and has tapered edges. But there's a downside to this design. Because the tapered edges are narrow, the volume and power buttons have been moved to the back of the tablet. I found them clumsy and slow to use.

Like its predecessors, the Fire HDX is technically an Android tablet that buries Android so it's invisible. The HDX lacks any hint of Google's Android interface, the standard Google apps that come on most Android devices and the standard Android app store, Google Play. Instead it uses an Amazon operating system now called Fire OS 3.0.

Amazon has its own app store for the Fire HDX and it contains 85,000 apps, compared with roughly a million each in the Google and Apple app stores.

The Mayday help button worked mostly as advertised, though I got little useful help, partly because Amazon is training a large number of support people and few have much experience yet with the new HDX.

When you click the Mayday button, which appears in a settings bar that swipes down from the top of the screen, a small, movable video window pops up. You can see the support person, but he or she can only hear you. To better explain things, the person can draw on your screen. And if you allow it, he or she can take over the Fire to perform tasks.

The support people appeared in 10 seconds or less and were unfailingly friendly. But they often just went poking around the device, looking for a menu item or icon that would accomplish what I couldn't figure out. In two cases, they put me on pause, to do some quick research. Amazon says their knowledge will grow as they get more familiar with the new hardware and software.

In one case, a Mayday agent I had previously talked with followed up on an earlier question concerning how to get an app that wasn't in the Amazon app store for the HDX. She sent me an email explaining how to do a 10-step workaround.

Mayday isn't entirely private. You have to give agents your name, email and address, the call is recorded and customer-service management can see reports on individual calls. But overall, it's a great idea.

If you mainly want a tablet for consuming content and regularly use Amazon content, the new Kindle Fire HDX is a good deal.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Universal Car Headrest Mount For Tablets, Fits All iPad Models, Galaxy Tab, Amazon Kindle Fire And More

Universal Car Headrest Mount For Tablets, Fits All iPad Models, Galaxy Tab, Amazon Kindle Fire And More

• Double fasteners secure mount to the back of the headrest while on the go
• Multiple adjustment knobs to create the perfect angle and height for optimal viewing
• Compatible with all tablets, including iPad, Galaxy Tab, Amazon kindle fire and more
• Soft interior padding provides a no-slip grip, protects your device from scratches

Keep your device securely and conveniently mounted to your headrest for easy backseat viewing. This versatile mount can switch between vertical and horizontal angles for optimal viewing and is easy to install or remove in all vehicles.

Double fasteners secure mount to the back of the headrest while on the go
Multiple adjustment knobs to create the perfect angle and height for optimal viewing
Compatible with all tablets, including iPad, Galaxy Tab, A

It’s Time To Buy Grandma An LCD E-Reader Because She’ll Be Able To Read More

A study from Matthias Schlesewsky at Johannes Gutenberg University found that readers older than 60 benefit markedly from the backlit screen of many ereader tablets despite their perceived dislike of the platform.

While younger folks exhibited no difference in reading on multiple devices, seniors were able to concentrate more completely using a tablet computer.

The researchers found that younger readers between the ages of 21 and 34 showed similar eye movements and EEG measures of brain activity across the three reading devices. Older adults aged 60-77 years spent less time fixating the text and showed lower brain activity when using a tablet computer, as compared to the other media. The study concludes that this effect is likely due to better text discrimination on the backlit displays.

This is obviously a bit of a blip – you’re not going to change grandpa’s mind if he loves to lug around his copy of Team Of Rivals all day – but it’s interesting to note that the e-reader market is far larger than we assume it is as Baby Boomers start thinking harder about how they read.

via Eurealert

[Image: Shutterstock]

Amazon takes aim at Apple iPad with larger 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD

“Amazon.com Inc unveiled a larger, high-speed Kindle Fire tablet on Thursday for $499, challenging Apple Inc’s dominant iPad and intensifying a battle with Google Inc and Microsoft in the booming tablet arena,” Lisa Richwine and Alistair Barr report for Reuters.

“The world’s largest Internet retailer, which got into the market last year with a tablet roughly half the price of the iPad, will begin selling on Nov 20 an 8.9-inch version with a high-definition screen, that works off fourth-generation or 4G wireless broadband,” Richwine and Barr report. “Called the Kindle Fire HD, its price tag matches the current-generation WiFi-only iPad but its 1920 by 1200 resolution screen lags Apple’s so-called ‘retina’ display. At 8.9 inches, it is also smaller.”

“Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, taking the stage in Santa Monica, California, unveiled two 8.9-inch versions, both called the Kindle Fire HD. A Wi-Fi version will go for $299. Two 7-inch tablets will cost less. The updated Kindle Fire will go for $159 and a Kindle Fire HD version is priced at $199,” Richwine and Barr report. “On Thursday, the company also showed off a ‘paperwhite’ e-reader with a much sharper screen and longer battery life. The 3G wireless version that made digital readers mainstream will sell for $179 starting in October, in time for the crucial holiday season. A Wi-Fi-only version will go for $119, and the cheapest will carry a $69 price tag — undercutting the cheapest Barnes and Noble Nook.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Competition is only good when the competition is any good. For now, at these price points, Amazon has some compelling tablet/e-readers.

For sure, they’re still inferior in terms of hardware, software, industrial design, and ecosystem versus what Apple already offers today and has been offering for years, but Wintel long ago proved that quality and ease-of-use doesn’t matter as much as price to the great unwashed – plus Amazon’s offerings are markedly less inferior to Apple’s current lineup after today.

Today, from Amazon, we saw the first real challenge to Apple’s iPad hegemony.

You can bet they’re crunching iPad numbers in Cupertino this afternoon. Can’t wait to see your answers, Apple!

Related article:
Amazon announces slew of new Kindle tablets – September 6, 2012