With great power comes great responsibility — and a flurry of advertising campaigns that target your wares. Samsung tried to make its name a verb in a recent round of anti-Apple ads where senseless iPhone owners got “Samsunged,” and the South Korea-based vendor’s campaign culminated with a $10 million extravaganza that aired during the Super Bowl. Amazon is next up to the plate, and the company’s recent commercial takes aim at Apple’s iPad. A woman sunbathing and reading a boo...

E Ink, the popular company that provides paper-look gray-scale displays for eReaders, reported consolidated revenues of $48.02 million in January, down 63.6% from the same month last year and 11% sequentially. The growing popularity of media tablets with full-color displays likely played a big role in the decline — sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet are thought to be eating into the companies’ respective dedicated eReader businesses to an extent. Even thoug...

Barnes & Noble’s fifth-generation “e-reading device” will reportedly launch this coming spring. Mentioned in passing within a New York Times profile of the struggling bookseller, it is unclear if the device in question will be a new media tablet or a standard eReader. With Barnes & Noble’s current-generation color tablet having just been announced this past November, however, a refresh of the company’s E Ink-equipped Nook Touch in the spring seems more likely. Barnes &...

Best Buy on Friday reported weaker than expected revenue for the five weeks ended December 31st, 2011. The company noted $8.4 billion in revenue, which was flat compared to the same period last year but included a comparable store sales decline of 1.2%. The company’s international segment generated $1.9 billion in revenue, a 1.7% decrease and a 4.3% drop off in store sales. Its domestic segment generated $6.5 billion in revenue, which was up 0.4% from the same period last year but it also represented a ...

Amazon’s Kindle line was expected to be a popular option for holiday shoppers and the retailer confirmed as much on Thursday. Straying from its normally tight-lipped stance with regard to sharing sales volumes, Amazon announced that its Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle eReaders have sold more than 1 million combined units for three consecutive weeks. ”Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched – it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we’v...

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a smash hit, with fourth-quarter sales that may exceed even the most lofty estimates reported ahead of the tablet’s recent launch. In just over six weeks of availability this quarter, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that Amazon will sell as many as 6 million Kindle Fire tablets. Add to that another 8 million Kindle-branded eBook readers the firm sees Amazon selling between October and the end of this year, and the retailer looks to be in store for a huge holiday quarter....

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened formal proceedings to investigate whether or not major eBook publishers, possibly “with the help of Apple,” are “engaged in anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of eBooks.” The publishing companies named in the investigation include Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck. “The Commission will in particular investigate whether these publishing groups ...

Barnes & Noble on Thursday reported its results for the second fiscal quarter of 2012, in which it revealed its Nook business has seen stellar growth over the last year. The company said that its Nook business, which includes sales of tablets, eReaders and eBooks, pulled in $220 million in the second quarter, up 85% from the same quarter last year. Barnes & Noble did not reveal how many Nook devices it sold during the quarter but said that it expects to sell “millions of devices” during th...

Strong demand for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet and the continued popularity of Kindle eReaders lead to the retail giant’s best-ever Black Friday for the Kindle family of products. Amazon on Monday announced that sales of Kindle devices on Black Friday quadrupled last year’s sales, setting a new record. The company neglected to report sales figures, however it did say it sold millions of new Kindle eReaders and Kindle Fire tablets combined before the Black Friday shopping weekend began. &...

Amazon has been a leader in the eBook reader space since it first introduced the Kindle eReader in November 2007. At that point in time, the Kindle had a 6-inch E Ink display that supported just four shades of gray, it included 250MB of storage that could accommodate about 200 eBooks, and it retailed for $399. For the first six months or so, Amazon couldn’t keep the device in stock — it was a smash hit. (more…)

Barnes & Noble took the wraps off of the Nook Tablet during a press event in New York City on Monday morning. The device runs Android 2.3, has a 7-inch LG “Vivid View” display, 16GB of expandable storage, 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1GHz processor. It also weighs under one pound and supports up to 11.5 hours of reading time on a single charge. Barnes & Noble said the device will have free access to AT&T and Barnes & Noble Wi-Fi hotspots. The Nook Tablet has the “deepest Netfli...

We’re live from Barnes & Noble’s press conference here in New York City where the bookseller is expected to take the wraps off its sequel to the Nook Color tablet. Though the firm used a heavily customized, unrecognizable version of Google’s Android platform to power the original Nook Color, it is still one of the most popular Android tablets in the short history of the media tablet category. Barnes & Noble has reportedly shipped more than 3 million Nook Color slates to date, and wit...

Barnes & Noble is holding a press conference on Monday morning where the company is expected to unveil a new color eBook reader that will go head-to-head with Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet. According to a recent report, the slate in question will be Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color 2 and it will feature a 7-inch 1024 x 600-pixel display, 16GB of storage, 1GB of RAM and a dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4 processor. Rumors also suggest the tablet will be priced at $249, $50 more than the hotly...

Barnes & Noble may release the successor to its Nook Color Android tablet on November 7th, according to The Digital Reader. Reportedly, the bookseller is preparing an entire new “Nook” department of its brick and mortar stores, which will include LED TVs and point-of-sale systems for shoppers interested in buying the eReader on the spot. It is unclear what sort of specs the Nook Color 2 will feature, although we suspect the device will run Android and its screen will be similar to the 7-inch ...