2010 – The Year Of The Ebook Reader

Amazon has had a great year in 2009. A lot of the credit for that must go to the Kindle ebook reader family. The Kindle 2.0 and its larger sibling, the DX, have been a huge success for Amazon. The Kindle is now Amazon’s number one selling product.

Copyright Problems May Slow Digital Book Libraries

Internet search giant Google has been found guilty of copyright infringement by a court in Paris. French publisher, La Martiniere, was awarded 300,000 Euros ($ 430,000) in damages and interest. Google was also ordered to pay the sum of 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until it withdraws the book extracts from its database. The court hearing was initiated by the French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – who demanded that Google be forced to pay 15m Euros ($ 21m).

Kindle Accessories Market Booming

Although Amazon are being unashamedly coy with regard to sales figures, there can be little doubt that they are happy with the performance of their Kindle ebook reader family to date. The original Kindle was launched in November 2007 and demand was so high that Amazon’s shelves were empty less than 6 hours later. It remained out of stock until April 2008.