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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Amazon has acquired Evi, a company that offers a Siri-like voice-activated personal assistant, for $26 million, according to reports.

Much like Siri, Evi(which is already available as an iPhone and an Android app) invites users ask questions and search for solutions. Looking for a restaurant, information on the number of calories in a meal or who directed a specific film? Evi will search the Internet to find answers and will speak the answer back to you. She’ll also send text messages on your behalf and give you directions. We’ve embedded a video demonstration of the tool above.

It’s not clear what Amazon plans to do with the technology but it would support rumors of a Kindle phone and perhaps they would even add the feature to Kindle tablets and eReaders. Evi, can you read me War and Peace?

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To prepare, the company is asking developers in almost 200 countries to submit their apps to its Appstore. The apps will be made available when the Amazon Appstore for Android launches in these countries in the coming months.

Here is more from the press release: “Registered developers who want international distribution will have their apps automatically made available for download, unless they designate otherwise.  Signing up is easy and developers can get started today by visiting the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal.“

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Thinking about self-publishing your book in Amazon’s booming marketplace? The online bookseller has a number of helpful tutorials for independent authors, including Building Your Book for Kindle and Building Your Book for Kindle for Mac.

In the video embedded above, you can watch a tutorial about how to self-publish your book for the Amazon Kindle. You can also read the text from the video at this link. Here’s more from Amazon’s collection of tools for Kindle publishers:

Delivering a high quality, properly formatted book to your readers is important. Books that aren’t properly formatted may impact your sales in the form of negative reviews from readers, and in some cases, be removed from the Kindle Store. There are many file types that can be uploaded and published using KDP; some requiring only minimal formatting. We encourage you to check out the tools and resources which can help in creating and previewing your book prior to publishing.

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Matt Cavnar, VP of business development, at Vook is excited about the update. “The move to support video and audio enhanced eBooks on the part of the marketplace leader demonstrates that enhanced ebooks are here to stay, that there is significant reader demand for video and audio enhanced ebooks (as we’ve learned first hand at Vook), and that the growing catalog of enhanced content has enough scale that it merits access to the Kindle family of devices,” he said via email.  continued…

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UPDATE: Goodreads posted this message about the implications of the purchase, especially for device owners:

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads. And it’s incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets. For all of you Kindle readers, there’s obviously an extra bonus in this announcement. You’ve asked us for a long time to be able to integrate your Kindle and Goodreads experiences. Making that option a reality is one of our top priorities.

continued…

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The company, which already publishes sales rankings data for apps published in iTunes and Google Play, now has a beta version of what is popular in Amazon’s App Store. This includes lists of the most popular paid, free and new Amazon apps. It does not yet include the top grossing apps on Amazon, as the site publishes for the other app stores.

Popular paid apps on the list today include Temple Run: Oz by Disney; Mincraft by Mojang; and Angry Birds Star Wars by Rovio. The Croods by Rovio; Beach Buggy Blitz by Vector Unit; and Temple Run 2 by Imangi Studios are the most popular free apps on the list today. (Via VentureBeat).

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