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Amazon.com Inc shares hit a record on Tuesday after it reported better-than-expected quarterly profit, fueled by the growth of higher-margin businesses during the fiercely competitive holiday quarter.

Best-selling author Stephen King has just released a passionate call for greater gun control, titled "Guns." In a coup for Amazon, the essay is available only through its Kindle Store for 99 cents.

"The President of Vice," an e-book that will be released Friday at the Kindle Singles store of Amazon.com, offers a ponytail-wearing, Trans Am-washing version of the vice president familiar to readers of The Onion.

Free digital copies of 50,000 CDs are being offered to Amazon customers via a service that stores the music in the cloud.

Revenue at Barnes & Noble stores fell 10.9% during the holidays, as sales of Nook devices slipped, a sign that the retailer is falling behind in the tablet battle with Amazon, Apple and Google.

2012 was a good year for Amazon. Not only has the company announced that the Kindle Fire HD was the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product on Amazon, but for the eighth consecutive year, the company ranks #1 in customer satisfaction during the holiday shopping season...

Amazon, Toys "R" Us and other retailers agreed to voluntarily recall Nap Nanny infant recliners after a recall plan couldn't be reached with the manufacturer following a series of infant deaths.

Amazon.com's latest technical glitch—interrupting service for Netflix Inc. and others—is causing some companies to rethink their reliance on the company for the bulk of their Web-computing needs.

'Freed' at last: What was the top-selling book of 2012 on Amazon? Fifty Shades Freed, the third book in E.L. James' erotic trilogy. No. 2 was Gillian Flynn's twisty thriller, Gone Girl. (Amazon did not count the first and second books in James' trilogy because they were released in 2011.) Read the entire list, which includes print and digital sales.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage. At least that was my thought when Random House and Penguin, two of the world’s six largest publishers, announced that they were coming together last month. Ever since Amazon began ripping apart the book business, the largest houses have been looking for a way to fight back. If this merger is any indication, they have chosen an old-fashioned strategy: Size.