NATIONAL
April 9, 2012 | By Kim Murphy
SEATTLE -- For the city of Seattle, Amazon.com has long been the 500-pound gorilla. But it isn't on fine display at the zoo, where the city can preen and show off the $48-billion-a-year company to visitors. Rather, the company is more like King Kong in the jungle, a powerful, largely invisible and vaguely threatening presence. Started in 1994 in the Seattle suburbs, the online retailer is one of the city's biggest downtown tenants, spread across a dozen buildings in the city's up-and-coming South Lake Union neighborhood.
BUSINESS
December 18, 2011 | Barney Jopson
First impressions last. So some people still think of Amazon.com as an online bookseller, the form in which it arrived on consumers' horizons in the late 1990s. But since then Amazon has been acquiring, expanding and diversifying at a dizzying speed. Jeff Bezos, its founder, chief executive and the owner of a wall-shaking laugh, has taken the company into shoes, diapers and flat-screen televisions, as well as cloud computing services and e-readers via its Kindle device. Amazon's non-retail dexterity reached a new level last month when the Seattle-based company unveiled a Kindle-branded tablet computer, the Fire, to rival Apple's iPad.
BUSINESS
November 27, 2011 | By David Sarno, Los Angeles Times
The iPad, the heavyweight champ of the tablet world, has summarily knocked out every challenger it has faced since it debuted last year. The defeated include tablets with names including Xoom, PlayBook, TouchPad, G-Slate and Streak, none of which has grabbed more than a tiny sliver of the $10-billion tablet market over which the iPad reigns. But now a pair of new lighter-weight contenders are aiming to hit Apple Inc. where it hurts: the price tag. Amazon.com Inc.'s $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble Inc. retail for less than half the cost of the lowest-priced iPad and are undercutting the prices of nearly every brand-name tablet on the market.
BUSINESS
November 8, 2011 | By Nathan Olivarez-Giles, Los Angeles Times
Barnes & Noble Inc. has unveiled its Nook Tablet, the bookseller's answer to rival Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire tablet. The Nook Tablet is now available for preorder and will be shipped to Barnes & Noble stores and other retailers (Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, Office Max and others) late next week at a price of $249 — about $50 more than the Kindle Fire. Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch said Monday that for the extra $50, the Nook Tablet will offer beefier specifications that will add up to a faster, smoother experience when reading books, playing games or watching movies.
BUSINESS
October 23, 2011 | Michael Hiltzik
California's role as a pioneer of crucial social, political and technological movements — the Internet, clean air standards, property tax reform, Lindsay Lohan case law — is part of the legacy we teach our schoolchildren. In that context, it's not too early to ponder the state's role in putting Amazon.com in its place, even though the ink is not quite dry on the deal signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month requiring the giant online retailer to collect sales tax on purchases by its California customers.
BUSINESS
October 7, 2011 | By Ben Fritz, Los Angeles Times
DC Comics' effort to expand digital distribution of its graphic novels has ignited a nasty battle between two bookselling giants. Barnes & Noble Inc. said Friday that its stores will not stock hard copies of 100 DC books that the Warner Bros.-owned unit is making available exclusively on Amazon.com's Kindle platform — a direct competitor of Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader. Beginning with the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet Nov. 15, Amazon will have exclusive digital distribution rights for four months to books that include "Watchmen" and graphic novels featuring Batman and Superman.