Apple's iTunes Store isn't the only one that has adjusted prices for its digital song downloads recently: Changes are showing up at Amazon's and Wal-Mart's online music stores, too.

Apple Inc. ( AAPL - news - people ), the dominant digital music retailer on the Internet, shifted Tuesday from selling all songs for 99 cents apiece to a tiered pricing model where songs cost 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 each. Recording companies are choosing the prices.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple also eliminated the copy-protection technology that limited users' abilities to copy and play songs on devices other than Apple's own iPods.

On the same day Apple made its changes, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ( WMT - news - people )'s online music store began selling tunes for $1.24, 94 cents and 64 cents apiece. Previously, they cost 74 cents and 94 cents apiece.

In an e-mail, Walmart.com spokesman Ravi Jariwala said the pricing adjustments are "reflective of new costs set by the music industry."

Elsewhere on the Web, Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc. ( AMZN - news - people ) is also selling individual song downloads for as much as $1.29. Most songs currently cost $1.29, 99 cents, 89 cents or 69 cents each. Amazon did not say when it began selling songs for $1.29; when the store first opened in September 2007, songs sold for 89 cents and 99 cents.

Wal-Mart and Amazon downloads had already been free of copy protection.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

When the Kindle e-reader first appeared 14 months ago, Amazon-watchers were surprised to see the e-commerce giant redefine itself as a gadget maker. But Tuesday, when Amazon.com released a free application for the iPod and iPhone that allows users to read its e-books on those devices, it cemented its original book-selling mission.

In other words, it's all about the content.

The Kindle software for the iPhone and iPod, which Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos first hinted at during the release of the Kindle 2 last month, allows users to buy and read any of Amazon 230,000 e-books on any of the three devices and seamlessly move them among the gadgets.

While the software gives up the Kindle's exclusive hold on Amazon's digital catalog, it taps into a potentially much larger audience for Amazon's e-books--Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) has sold around 15 million iPhones, while Amazon had sold only around 500,000 Kindles at last count, according to an estimate by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. And that, says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, means Amazon has definitively focused on selling e-books above selling e-readers.

"This puts a stake in the ground around the idea that they really want you to be able to access the content you buy from them on any platform. And that's something we haven't seen other major media initiatives do," McQuivey says.

Apple's iTunes store, by contrast, has traditionally sold content tied to its music players--a bid to sell more hardware rather than content. Amazon, McQuivey says, has now made clear it's taking the opposite approach. "Amazon is saying, 'This is about books. We want you to feel that you can read our books anywhere, and we want you to buy more of them,'" McQuivey says. "They're saying, 'We're not a Kindle maker. We're a content provider and a content liberator.'"

Amazon may be liberating its content, but it's not liberating its hardware. Even as the company's book-selling platform expands, it's not likely to become compatible with other content providers. That could give the e-retailer a stranglehold on the budding market for e-books, a strategy likely to rankle publishers.

In an essay for Forbes last month, tech publisher Tim O'Reilly criticized Amazon's decision to close the Kindle to non-Amazon content (see "Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book"). Unless the company opened the Kindle to formats like epub, which work across a variety of non-Amazon-sanctioned devices, the Kindle would become irrelevant in two or three years, he predicts.

One thing I've learned in the years I've been reviewing products is that design details matter, even if the eye at first skims over them. The shape of a button or placement of a key can mean the difference between delight and drudgery. So it's not surprising that subtle changes in Amazon.com's (AMZN) second-generation Kindle e-book reader make it a vastly better product than the original.

Introduced in late 2007, the Kindle was a breakthrough in the long-disappointing field of e-book readers. Despite its mediocre hardware design, Amazon's elegant solution for buying and downloading content over an invisible network made it a winner. With the Kindle 2 ($359), Amazon is at last offering a device that is as good as the rest of the system. The combination of the new hardware and its superior book-buying experience puts the Kindle 2 miles ahead of its only real rival, the $300 Sony (SNE) Reader.

Better-Placed Buttons

Using the new Kindle is nothing like reading e-books on a laptop. You can enjoy the device anywhere you can whip out a regular book and not worry much about how you hold it. This wasn't necessarily the case with the Kindle 1. So much of its surface was covered with buttons that I never knew quite where to put my hands, and I was forever unintentionally turning pages, jumping to the menu, or triggering some other disruption.

The Kindle 2's buttons are much smaller and better placed. The ones that turn pages have been redesigned and no longer respond to a stray press on the edge of the reader. The odd scroll wheel on the original Kindle has been replaced by a more traditional five-way navigation control of the sort used on many cell phones. These changes—a cleaner look overall and half the thickness (just over a third of an inch)—add up to a far more pleasant experience.

Amazon also either left alone or improved the parts that worked well. Delivery of books, magazines, and newspapers is done over the Sprint (S) wireless broadband network and requires no user registration or extra fees. Purchases are billed to your Amazon account, and the cost of the network is built into the price. (One downside: Amazon's choice of network technology, along with content-licensing issues, limits the Kindle to the U.S. market, at least for now.) A redesigned keyboard lets you check for titles in the Kindle store, search for text in a book, or add annotations or bookmarks.

There are other nifty improvements: The display, based on technology from E Ink in Cambridge, Mass., supports 16 shades of grey instead of 4. Power consumption, low to begin with, has been cut further, so the battery lasts for days at a stretch. Pages turn a bit faster, and the Kindle can even read text to you—though no one will confuse its synthesized voice with that of an audiobook. There's enough memory to store 1,500 books, so managing your library is likely to be a bigger problem than running out of space. If you have multiple Kindles, new or old, linked to the same Amazon account, downloaded content appears on all of them. And Amazon promises, a bit vaguely, the future ability to load Kindle books onto other devices.

Not Perfect in Dim Light

There are things that could be done to make the Kindle even better. The E Ink display, which relies on reflected light rather than the backlight used by a computer or phone screen, is easy on the eyes, provided the lighting is good. But, as with Kindle 1, the letters are dark grey on light grey rather than black on white and thus a little hard to read in dim conditions. And too often I find that the book I want isn't available, even though Amazon offers more than 200,000 titles. (Prices range from $1 to around $15, with most books going for $10.) One last gripe, which isn't going to change: Unlike a paper book, a Kindle title can't be sold or given away when you're done with it.

Ultimately, the best market for the Kindle may be as a replacement for huge, expensive textbooks. But textbooks need a low-cost, large-format display and, especially for K-12 education, color. E Ink is working on both, but neither is likely in the near term.

I still prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of reading ink-and-paper books. But a couple of weeks with the Kindle 2 is converting me. The ability to carry a whole library in a 10-oz. package makes it a reader's treasure.

The InfoTech 100

Which companies are logging the strongest growth, which industries are the hottest, and how the winners are faring in a treacherous economic climate

How do you pick the best-performing tech companies in the world? At BusinessWeek, we sort through the financial results of 30,500 publicly traded companies and rank the tech players on four criteria: shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues, and revenue growth. The companies leading the list are those with the lowest aggregate ranking.

Amazon.com and Apple took the top two spots this year. Still, the dominance of U.S. companies is in decline: The country has 33 companies among the IT 100 this year, down from 43 in 2007. When we first started compiling the list in 1998 to rank tech's top performers, 75 of the winners were U.S. companies.

NOTE: A more complete explanation of methodology is below the table.

Click column heading once to reorder from highest to lowest. Click twice to reorder from lowest to highest.

Rank	Company Name	Industry*	Country	Revenues Millions	Revenues Rank	Rev. Growth Percent	Rev. Growth Rank	ROE Percent	ROE Rank	Shareholder Return Percent	Shareholder Return Rank	Profits Millions
1	AMAZON.COM	NET	U.S.	15,955.0	23	39	29	35	22	28	29	508
2	APPLE	COMP	U.S.	28,747.0	15	33	39	24	44	74	10	4348
3	RESEARCH IN MOTION	COMM	Canada	5,765.9	55	66	8	33	24	152	1	1241
4	NINTENDO	SOFT	Japan	14,876.5	25	73	5	21	60	55	17	2289
5	WESTERN DIGITAL	COMP	U.S.	7,448.0	47	44	25	36	19	64	12	866
6	AM?ICA M?IL	TELE	Mexico	28,761.5	14	33	40	46	10	10	56	5408
7	CHINA MOBILE	TELE	China	45,863.1	9	21	61	23	48	90	9	11780
8	NOKIA	COMM	Finland	73,344.4	6	24	55	49	8	8	60	10350
9	ASUSTEK COMPUTER	COMP	Taiwan	17,343.8	20	57	11	16	76	38	21	672
10	HIGH TECH COMPUTER	COMP	Taiwan	3,232.5	70	45	23	59	5	111	6	782
11	GOOGLE	NET	U.S.	18,116.1	18	51	16	19	70	22	36	4509
12	MTN GROUP	TELE	S. Africa	10,208.4	35	42	28	22	53	41	20	1480
13	IBM	COMP	U.S.	101,259.0	4	9	95	38	17	20	38	10893
14	MOBILE TELESYSTEMS	TELE	Russia	8,252.4	44	29	47	38	16	26	31	2072
15	TELEF?ICA	TELE	Spain	81,077.0	5	7	98	44	11	16	44	12793
16	VIMPELCOM	TELE	Russia	7,164.6	49	47	20	27	32	19	39	1463
17	HON HAI PRECISION IND.	COMP	Taiwan	40,876.4	11	45	22	23	50	-3	82	1853
18	AT&T	TELE	U.S.	120,703.0	1	58	9	11	95	4	68	12564
19	ACCENTURE	SVCS	U.S.	23,276.6	16	19	65	69	3	-3	83	1450
20	LG ELECTRONICS	COMP	Korea	56,834.8	8	15	81	15	81	151	2	1307
21	BHARTI AIRTEL	COMM	India	4,605.8	61	58	10	35	20	11	55	1016
22	ORACLE	SOFT	U.S.	21,020.0	17	24	57	24	43	11	52	5088
23	MICROSOFT	SOFT	U.S.	57,954.0	7	17	76	44	12	-3	84	16419
24	MAROC TELECOM	TELE	Morocco	3,495.6	65	22	59	46	9	49	18	1020
25	TURKCELL ILETISIM HIZMETLERI	TELE	Turkey	6,328.6	52	35	35	23	47	34	24	1350
26	LG DISPLAY	COMM	Korea	15,267.5	24	35	33	16	78	17	41	1430
27	NHN	NET	Korea	686.3	100	56	12	40	15	59	14	160
28	COSMOTE MOBILE TELECOM.	TELE	Greece	4,396.1	63	28	49	53	7	17	43	519
29	MILLICOM INTL. CELLULAR	TELE	Lux.	2,630.6	77	67	6	34	23	12	50	439
30	HEWLETT-PACKARD	COMP	U.S.	107,671.0	2	14	83	21	61	11	54	7850
31	COMPAL ELECTRONICS	COMP	Taiwan	11,838.4	32	44	24	12	94	18	40	271
32	SISTEMA	TELE	Russia	10,862.8	34	43	27	18	71	10	57	813
33	ORASCOM TELECOM	TELE	Egypt	4,545.8	62	35	32	36	18	5	66	755
34	SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS	SEMI	Korea	104,791.6	3	15	80	12	93	25	32	7894
35	CHINA UNITED TELECOMMUNICATIONS	TELE	China	13,594.1	30	25	54	10	98	64	13	762
36	MOBINIL	TELE	Egypt	1,471.9	92	29	48	104	2	36	22	327
37	CARSO GLOBAL TELECOM	TELE	Mexico	16,154.6	22	7	97	43	13	4	70	1156
38	KONINKLIJKE KPN	TELE	Neth.	17,900.1	19	4	99	59	6	-3	81	3810
39	CISCO SYSTEMS	COMM	U.S.	37,684.0	13	18	72	25	41	-4	86	8069
40	WISTRON	COMP	Taiwan	6,843.4	50	34	36	19	69	17	42	165
41	MOBILE TELECOMMUNICATIONS	TELE	Kuwait	6,038.0	54	39	30	20	64	13	49	1154
42	ACTIVISION	SOFT	U.S.	2,608.2	78	88	2	15	82	35	23	286
43	REDECARD	SVCS	Brazil	984.6	97	305	1	135	1	NA	78	385
44	CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR	SEMI	U.S.	1,695.6	87	43	26	26	36	23	34	378
45	ZTE	COMM	China	4,705.6	59	51	15	10	99	34	25	169
46	LENOVO GROUP	COMP	Hong Kong	14,590.2	27	10	94	14	86	91	8	161
47	TELEMAR NORTE LESTE	TELE	Brazil	9,645.8	39	4	100	20	67	111	5	1478
48	CORNING	COMM	U.S.	6,170.0	53	18	70	27	34	13	47	2852
49	PRICELINE.COM	NET	U.S.	1,390.8	93	24	56	27	33	129	4	157
50	TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MFG.	SEMI	Taiwan	9,826.4	37	19	66	25	39	2	73	3932

Amazon's new e-reader may be pretty, but it doesn't merit dropping another $359.

A new Amazon Kindle is coming out in a few days.

Due to high internet usage, people don't have enough time to read books. To read books is pretty important cause it's very hard to get every different kind of knowledge within finite time and place.

For me, it's a little bit sad for me to make a lot of excuse for having no time to read books.


I used to be kinda bookworms until I was 24 years old.
However, after getting a job, I thought I was kinda tied up to other things.

Anyway, I admitted that we should get indirect experience as much as we can.



Also, this is one way to give publishing company better circumstances to survive and help us to make our lives better.


Second Amazon Kindle has a better shaped, keyboard layout and a little bit wide and longer screen.

:) Enjoy!!!

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. called this holiday season its "best ever," saying Friday that it saw a 17 percent increase in orders on its busiest day - a rare piece of good news in a season that has been far from merry for most retailers, including online businesses.

Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on Dec. 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 percent rise over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day.

The company did not provide dollar figures and wouldn't say whether the average value of orders had changed, and the jumps it reported Friday are in line with increases Amazon has seen since it started releasing the figures in 2002.

Amazon's best-sellers included the Nintendo Wii game console, Samsung's 52-inch LCD HDTV and Apple Inc.'s iPod touch.

Analysts agreed Amazon's report was good news for the online shopping giant, but they were divided over whether the results indicate strength in online commerce in general.

Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru said Amazon's experience shows the current economy is favoring discount retailers, both online and offline.

"The Amazon story doesn't surprise me because Amazon has always traditionally been a leader on price, and they're one of the first places consumers go when they're looking for things online," Mulpuru said. "In many ways they're like the Wal-Mart of the online world."

Wal-Mart is one of very few traditional retailers where revenue has risen this holiday season over last.

Holiday sales typically account for 30 percent to 50 percent of a retailer's annual total, but rising unemployment, home foreclosures, the stock market decline and other economic worries led many shoppers to slash their shopping budgets this year.

SpendingPulse - a division of MasterCard Advisors - said its preliminary data show that online sales fell 2.3 percent compared with the 2007 holiday season, while retail sales overall fell 5.5 percent to 8 percent, including sales of cars and gasoline. The decline was 2 percent to 4 percent when auto and gas sales are excluded.

Online shopping may have gotten a boost from winter storms during last two weeks before Christmas, which made travel to brick-and-mortar stores more difficult.

And, although Amazon's orders rose, the company didn't say whether orders were, on average, worth more or less than last year. Spokeswoman Sally Fouts said the company would release revenue results in its fourth-quarter earnings report, due in about a month.

But she said this was Amazon's "best season ever."

Orders to Amazon on the peak day of its holiday season have jumped in the double-digit percentage range for at least the past 5 years, according to data released by the Seattle, Wash.-based company since 2002. Last year, Amazon's orders spiked 35 percent to 5.4 million at their peak, from 4 million in 2006.

Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Scott Devitt said online retailers' sales tend to grow much faster than those of brick-and-mortar retailers, but he said that difference narrowed this year. That's in part because shoppers tend to go to stores for necessities and online for discretionary purchases, he said. And in an economic downturn, consumers focus on their most-needed purchases and cut back on more frivolous items.

Devitt said Amazon benefited from a vast infrastructure that allows for faster, more reliable shipping than most of its online peers offer. He called Amazon's announcement an "extremely positive data point" and said the company is "uniquely positioned to do well in an environment like this."

That environment has left many retailers in a tough position. NPD Group senior retail analyst Marshal Cohen said they will be forced in coming weeks to take still more drastic measures to drive sales and raise whatever cash flow they can.

Amazon's shares gained 34 cents to close Friday at $51.78, a 0.7 percent rise.

AP Business Writer Lauren Shepherd contributed to this story from New York.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed