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Technical strength and lousy sentiment spell upside potential for Amazon and Netflix.

The novelist Philip Kerr has just given Allan Massie a thorough kicking on Amazon for his book, The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family that Shaped Britain.

The web commerce pioneer is building market share internationally by selling other companies' stuff.

Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader is getting access to Facebook and Twitter, along with several other enhancements, as part of a software update being sent wirelessly to the devices.

In a posting on Amazon's site, the company says the new software will let users share book passages on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The update will also let people sort books and documents into collections and lock their Kindle with a password. There also will be larger font options and the ability to zoom in on PDF documents.

Downloading content is becoming increasingly big business for the online retailer, which already has download offerings for its Kindle eBook, MP3 music and movies.

Amazon.com has unveiled a program that will give authors and publishers a larger share of revenue from each Kindle e-book they sell beginning on June 30, 2010. The 70-percent royalty option offers 70 percent of list price ...

Television search engine startup Clicker.com has been in private beta for several months, and sees its public launch today. Positioning itself as a “TV Guide for television content online,” Clicker has indexed over 400,000 episodes from 7000 television shows, making it a veritable one stop shop for finding legally-available TV shows online.

Online retailer Amazon.com has just announced a new checkout system called "PayPhrase" which speeds up the process of making online purchases by allowing shoppers to enter a unique phrase and 4-digit PIN number to complete their transaction. Both the phrase and PIN are created in advance and are linked to a shipping address and preferred method of payment.

Amazon lowered its prices on hot upcoming book releases to $9, once again matching Walmart.com in an escalating price war.