Amazon announced today that they will acquire Goodreads, the social network for readers.

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.

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Kindle users who subscribe to The New York Times for Kindle can now access NYTimes.com for free. Amazon announced this feature back in March when The New York Times started limiting the amount of articles that readers could access on its website for free.

Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content stated: “The New York Times continues to be our bestselling newspaper in the Kindle Store. We hope our customers enjoy this multi-tiered approach to getting their news, both on their Kindle and with full online access to all the features on NYTimes.com.”

If you’d like to read news beyond The New York Times and other Kindle newspaper subscriptions, you can create your own reading list using a free tool called Calibre. We explain how to download news into the app and then convert it for reading on the Kindle at this link.

On the stage at Digital Book World today, Russ Grandinetti, VP of Kindle Content at Amazon, spoke about the benefits of releasing books in eBook form. Boasting Amazon’s sales figures –the Kindle being the top selling item of all time; Kindle owners buy 3.3x as many books in the year after purchasing a Kindle than in the year prior—Grandinetti urged publishers to get their books in the Kindle store, if they haven’t done so already.

“However fast you think this change is happening, it is probably happening faster than you think,” he said referring to eBook adoption.

Grandinetti addressed the controversial question of pricing and urged publishers to experiment with low prices and free promotions, as you see in the video game and movie world. “We just need to make sure that the book competes with other media,” he said.

Challenging the agency model, Grandinetti shared a stat for one of Ken Follett’s books. According to Grandinetti, the week the publisher switched from the $7.99 Amazon price on the title to the $9.99 publisher determined price, Kindle sales of the book dropped by 48%. “Demand for eBooks is more elastic than you think,” he said.

Amazon a collection of introduced Kindle Singles today, the first since the format was announced back in October.

A Kindle single is defined as “Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.” These new books are categorized as between 10,000 and 30,000 words –or about 30-90 pages. These books are priced between $.99 and $4.99, similar to app pricing.

Launch titles include: Lifted, a bank heist book by Wired and New Yorker writer Evan Ratliff, from publisher The Atavist; The Happiness Manifesto by Nic Marks, one of the inaugural TEDBooks, about finding happiness beyond money; and Piano Demon by Brendan I. Koerner, the story of how a piano legend in a sharkskin suit lived the American Dream by leaving it behind.

Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content had this statement: “This first set of Singles was selected by our team of editors, and includes works by Rich Cohen, Darin Strauss, Ian Ayres, and the first-ever books published by TED. We think customers will be riveted by these stories that can take them to a Swedish bank heist or to the Mexican border town of Juarez, or to consider a new way to think about happiness.”

Amazon announced today that Nora Roberts is the third author to sell more than 1 million Kindle books.

According to an Amazon press release, as of yesterday, Nora Roberts sold 1,170,539 Kindle books under her name and her pseudonym J.D. Robb.

With this accomplishment, Roberts joins the “Kindle Million Club,” a group of authors who have sold more than a million Kindle books. Scandinavian author Stieg Larsson was the first author to sell a million eBooks through the Kindle store, followed by James Patterson.

Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content, had this statement: “Nora Roberts has been a bestseller at Amazon for 15 years so this accomplishment is no surprise. We’re happy to welcome Nora Roberts to the Kindle Million Club, joining Stieg Larsson and James Patterson.”

Russ Grandinetti, VP of Kindle content for Amazon, has ambitious goals for the Kindle store. In an interview with the LA Times, the Amazon executive, said that Amazon’s goal is to make “every book ever written, in any language, in print or out of print, all available within 60 seconds. And we want to make the customer experience great.”

In the interview Grandinetti defends Amazon’s proprietary software. Luckily these days, with a little bit of hacking ingenuity, Amazon books aren’t quite as fixed as they seem.

In the interview Grandinetti makes light of tensions between Amazon and publishers. He told the LA Times: “We disagree over a number of points, but there’s far more that we agree about. Amazon is a customer for publishers that’s helping to grow the book business. We believe the business is growing because we’ve built a store that’s incredibly easy to use.”

Amazon’s Kindle for the Web, which lets readers read books using a Web browser, is now live. The news comes a day after Google announced its entry into digital bookselling with the Google eBookstore, which includes the ability to read books through a Web browser.

Amazon launched the service in beta back in October, but today they announced new features. Kindle for the Web now lets bookstores, authors, publishers and other Web site owners sell Kindle books from their sites and earn a referral fee for sales from their site through the Amazon Associates Program.

Russ Grandinetti, VP, Kindle Content had this statement: “Kindle for the Web makes it possible for bookstores, authors, retailers, bloggers or other website owners to offer Kindle books on their websites and earn affiliate fees for doing so.”

Website owners can add Kindle books to their site by embedding a Kindle for the Web widget. The news was announced today at a Google Chrome event, as Kindle for the Web will work on Chrome OS devices.