Amazon

According to Amazon, being able to borrow eBooks leads to sales. The company reported today that in March, every time a customer borrowed an independently-published book from the Kindle Lending Library, the author earned $2.18.

For example, 24 percent of customers who borrowed Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games bought Catching Fire and 24 percent bought Mockingjay. In addition,  51 percent of customers who borrowed one of Debora Geary‘s books from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library purchased one of her titles.

eBookNewser has more: “Martin Crosbie, the author of My Temporary Life earned more than $45,000 in one month from paid sales and loans from the Kindle Store during the month of March. Crosbie credited the sales, which very much surpassed his $100 in income from February and January, to letting his book be available in the Kindle Lending Library.” Read more

Through a mysterious glitch in the Amazon Kindle Store, all the buy buttons on Kindle eBooks were deactivated this afternoon. UPDATE: The problem has now been fixed.

For a brief period, if you tried to buy a Kindle copy of The Hunger Games, for instance, you would see this message: “This title is not available for customers from: United States.”

In the Kindle Forums, user Duncan Lockhart posted a message from Kindle Direct: “We are currently working on a website issue that is affecting the buy box for Kindle books. Some Kindle books are not displaying pricing information and show as unavailable. We anticipate the issue will be resolved shortly, and will update the network when it’s been fixed.”

RosettaBooks has released a previously unpublished novella by Kurt Vonnegut. The 22,000-word Basic Training is on sale for $1.99 as a Kindle Single.

According to the publisher, the novelist tried to sell the novella to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s in the 1940s. His children acknowledged that the story was autobiographical.

Check it out: “Written to be sold under the pseudonym of ‘Mark Harvey’—Vonnegut was working in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting—BASIC TRAINING is the story of Haley Brandon. The adolescent protagonist comes to the farm of his relative, an old crazy who insists upon being called The General, who means to teach Haley to become a straight-shooting American. Haley’s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General’s deranged values.”

In a $775 million deal, Amazon will acquire Kiva Systems, a company that creates robotic tools for warehouses. The Fast Company video embedded above illustrates how Kiva robots work in a warehouse.

Will these new tools cut jobs? In his chilling essay, “Robots in 2015,” author Marshall Brain sees this new generation of robots as causing major unemployment problems in a few years. Check it out:

Competitive pressure will force Wal-mart, K-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, BJ’s, Sam’s Club, Toys R Us, Sears, J.C. Penny’s, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Kroger’s, Winn-Dixie, Pet Depot and so on to adopt the same robotic inventory systems in their stores. The entire transition will happen in just five years or so. Any company that does not automate will be at such a pricing disadvantage that it will go out of business. Ten million unemployed workers dumped onto the job market over the course of five years will have a profound effect on the unemployment statistics in the United States. The problem is that this same sort of thing will be happening in every sector of the economy at a very rapid pace, dumping millions more unemployed workers onto the job market at the same time.

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Hunger Games trilogy author Suzanne Collins is the best-selling Kindle author of all time, according to Amazon.

Over at Salon, Laura Miller took an in-depth look at the series’ success: “With the right title, a kid’s publisher can deploy something the world of adult publishing can only dream about: a large, well-oiled and highly networked group of professional and semi-professional taste makers who can make that book a hit even before it’s published.”

In June 2011, Collins became the first children’s books author to sell more than one million Kindle books. For the last ten weeks, the Hunger Games trilogy has occupied the top three spots on the USA Today best-seller list. In addition, the trilogy currently holds the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list (children’s series category) after 81 weeks on the list.

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The Department of Justice’s investigation into alleged eBook price collusion among Apple and select publishers is making various different people in the publishing business speak out.

Authors Guild president Scott Turow blasted the lawsuit in an open letter to members: “Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open.”

Author Barry Eisler responded to Turow in a blog post on J.A. Konrath‘s site. He wrote: “The problem is, this is a terribly tendentious way to state the argument, and it’s also a contradiction in terms. Maybe Scott would also argue that Apple is destroying computer-selling by selling so many computers, but logically, it’s pretty hard to see how someone could destroy bookselling by selling tons of books. In arguing that bookselling is destroying bookselling, Scott is making his biases as clear as his argument is turbid.”

Amazon has given the Los Angeles Review of Books a $25,000 grant. The literary journal will use the funds to pay its contributors and launch the complete site.

Founding editor Tom Lutz had this statement: “Corporate underwriting grants like these are crucial to helping us realize our vision: to create and sustain the most innovative new multimedia forum for the vibrant, ongoing dialogue about books and culture.”

The grant was part of Amazon’s “Supporting the Writing Community” program, helping fund groups like 826 Seattle, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the AWP, Copper Canyon Press, The Lambda Literary Foundation, Write Girl and PEN American Center.

Authors Guild president and novelist Scott Turow sent a blunt letter to members this afternoon, calling the possibility of a Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture.”

We’ve reprinted the entire letter below, but here is an excerpt: “Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open … The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.”

The news broke yesterday that the DOJ may sue Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA), Macmillan and HarperCollins for allegedly colluding to fix eBook prices when they established the agency model for eBook pricing.

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One Reddit user convinced Jonathan Franzen to sign his Kindle eReader this week, earning a “resigned sigh” from the digitally averse novelist.

As you can see by the image embedded above, it appears Franzen scribbled his name and wrote “SIGNED KINDLE” on the back of the device. Doubters can double-check the signature against this copy of Franzen’s signature.

Earlier this year, Franzen knocked digital books: “When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.” He also took a shot a Twitter this week.

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