The tool lets one friend start a gift and any of the recipient’s Facebook friends can contribute to the gift. Friends can add to the gift in increments of  $1, $5, $10 or $25. Mutual friends can see the gift once one friend creates it. Friends can write messages along with the gift.

The gift and these messages will appear alongside the gift on the recipient’s timeline on their actual birthday. Recipients will also see a link for their gift on their timeline alongside the messages.

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Oliver Pötzsch

This includes the combined worldwide sales of print, audio and eBook editions of his three books: The Hangman’s Daughter, The Dark Monk, and The Beggar King. The news comes as the author is readying to release his fourth book in the series, The Poisoned Pilgrim, which comes out on July 16^th.

Here is more about Pötzsch’s work from the press release:

Originally published by Ullstein in Pötzsch’s native German, the Hangman’s Daughter series is acquired, translated into English, and published in digital editions by AmazonCrossing, Amazon Publishing’s imprint focused on acquiring exceptional works of world literature for translation. “The Hangman’s Daughter,” Pötzsch’s debut novel, became a #1 bestselling Kindle book. Trade paperback editions of the books are published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in a licensing agreement with Amazon Publishing.

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Here is more about how it works from the press release:

Storyteller begins by scanning a movie script that has been uploaded to Amazon Studios. It identifies the scenes, locations and characters from scene descriptions, and ‘casts’ them from a library of thousands of characters, props and backgrounds. Filmmakers can recast or change locations, or they can upload their own images. Storyteller places the cast in front of the right background so that filmmakers can focus their time on the emotion and energy of scenes by using pan and zoom, changing the facial expressions and positions of characters, adding vehicles or props or adding captions with descriptions or additional dialogue.  continued…

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Today through June 8th, the Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, and the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G are all good for the discount when you use the promotional code DADSFIRE at checkout.  The offer is good while supplies last. The promotion is only good on one device per customer, and it’s only good in the U.S.

Barnes & Noble has run Father’s Day deals on its Nook devices in the past, but so far the company hasn’t mentioned such a deal on their site.

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Amazon has also expanded the availability of the Kindle Fire, and will make it available in more 170 new countries on June 13. The Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9” are now available for preorder in Ireland, Gibraltar, Austria, Monaco and Luxembourg.

“Kindle Fire HD is the No. 1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” stated Dave Limp, VP, Amazon Kindle.

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The platform is designed to let writers create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters. And using licenses, writers can earn royalties from their work. Amazon has licenses for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries, and plans to announce more soon.

Amazon will 35% of net revenue for works at least 10,000 words. Amazon Publishing is also piloting a new program for  short works which run between 5,000 and 10,000 words. These short stories, which are typically priced less than $1, Amazon will pay the royalties for the World’s rights holder and pay authors a digital royalty of 20%. continued…

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To help get users started, Amazon is giving away 500 “Amazon Coins”  to every Kindle Fire owner in the U.S. This equals about $5. To encourage adoption, Amazon will give discounts to users. The more they buy, the larger the discount.

Developers that want to offer Amazon coins should follow this link. Here is more from the press release: “Amazon Appstore developers will earn their standard 70% revenue share when customers make purchases using Amazon Coins. No Coins-specific changes are required for developers with apps and games currently in the Amazon Appstore.”

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Using the app, you can upload photos from your iPhone and save it to the Amazon Cloud or download photos from the cloud that you had uploaded from your computer.

Amazon is not the only cloud service to offer storage via an iPhone app. Apple itself has the iCloud service and there are a number of other third party apps that will let you free up space on your device through cloud storage.

Still, if you are already an Amazon Cloud user and you have an iPhone, this is good news for you.

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Amazon introduced a Kindle Store in China a couple of months back. The company has yet to begin selling its devices in China, but the Kindle store works through Kindle iOS and Android apps available in Chinese.

Amazon has been expanding Kindle’s international presence over the past couple of years. Over the past few months, the company launched the Kindle Store in Brazil and the Kindle launched in Japan. Back in 2011, the company opened Kindle stores in Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

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Users who have difficulty seeing can choose to have the app read to them character-by-character, word-by-word, line-by-line, or continuously, and can tell the app to go forward or backward. The voice tool also allows the user to search in the book to find a specific passage. In addition, users can add and delete notes, create bookmarks, and highlight passages. The new features are available on Kindle for iOS, and will be available on other platforms soon.

Dorothy Nicholls, VP of Amazon Kindle stated: “With this update, we’re also making customer-favorite features—such as X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking—more accessible. We look forward to continuing to develop and extend our accessibility features on Kindle Fire and our other Kindle apps.”

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The 4.0.1.3 update optimizes the Kindle Store experience including a new library interface, a redesigned home screen, and a simpler navigation. The app now features a carousel display of recent items that the user has accessed on their Kindle app home screen. The new navigation panel organizes content so that users can jump between eBooks, and Newsstand periodicals. It also makes it easier to navigate between content that is downloaded on the app and content that is in the cloud.

The update also makes it easier for users to access to eBook samples. New users will be encouraged to explore free sample chapters for current bestsellers on the app’s home screen.

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During the quarter, Amazon acquired social reading platform Goodreads; made the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” available in more countries; and made Amazon MP3s available to iPhone users. They also grew the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which lets Amazon Prime customers borrow eBooks for free, to 300,000 books. The company also focused on expanding its TV and film licensing agreements and on creating original programming.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” stated Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

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The number of paid app downloads in Google Play is 2x that in the Amazon Appstore , according to Distimo AppIQ data.

The latest research compares the trends in app downloads between Amazon and Google during March 2013. Check it out: “The Amazon Appstore competes aggressively with Google Play in terms of the top 1000 paid applications: the number of paid downloads is roughly twice the size in Google Play.”

The research also revealed that across both app stores, the top 200 free apps had a total of 16 million downloads during the month and the most category was games. In addition, Temple Run 2 was the most downloaded free app in both of the stores. Fruit Ninja also did well during March, when it had 2.3 million installs from Google Play and 250,000 downloads from the Amazon Appstore. According to Distimo, Rovio Entertainment was the top publisher in March. Its app The Croods ranked well.

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Kindle Singles is designed as a place where journalists and authors can publish works that are longer than your typical magazine article but shorter than a book. This includes essays, novellas and long form stories. The format has attracted the likes of Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and Lee Child, among many others.

The New York Times points out that the business is profitable, having sold five million copies since it launched in January 2011. The Times even asserts, “…the program is as much about gaining entree into the literary world as it is about revenue.” Do you agree?

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According to the reports, Amazon has applied for various patents in Russia, including the right to store and deliver goods; the ability to store text and media files; and the right to publish books.

Amazon already operates in the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, Italy, China, Spain and Brazil. Amazon has been expanding its business internationally over the past year. Amazon opened its Kindle Stores across Europe in 2011 and opened up in Japan last fall. Earlier this week, the company expanded its App Store to almost 200 countries worldwide, including: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, Papua New Guinea and Vatican City.

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