The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

“We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities,” Mike George, Amazon’s VP of apps and games, said in a statement. “Today is Day One for Coins.”

Users can buy 100 coins for $1, with discounts up to 10 percent for larger purchases. Developers get their standard 70 percent revenue share for purchases made with Amazon Coins.

The podcast is sponsored by Amazon Publishing’s romance imprint, Montlake Romance. The first two featured titles – Crazy Little Thing by Tracy Brogan and The Second Chance Café by Alison Kent — were both published by Montlake, although USA Today, which first reported the news about the podcast, says that “the books discussed will span a variety of publishers and imprints, including indie-pubbed books.” (Many of those indie-pubbed books will likely be published through Amazon’s own KDP.)

The podcast host is Laura Roppé, a singer-songwriter and the author of Rocking the Pink: Finding Myself on the Other Side of Cancer, published by Seal Press in 2012.

There are a number of podcasts out there focused on romance books, including those from Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Romance Radio Network. One possible advantage of “Kindle Love Stories” is that, if it focuses primarily on titles published by Amazon, all of those titles should be available free to Kindle owners through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005. For the next five years, he served at the company in a number of Kindle-related roles, helping to launch the first two Kindle models and the Kindle DX. “I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all,” he writes. “I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I’ve traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I’ve watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I’ve talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks.”

I found Burning the Page the most interesting when Merkoski discusses his experience at Amazon, working directly for CEO Jeff Bezos. “I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop,” he wrote. But he can’t share much:

• “I believe Jeff [Bezos] wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.”
• “The Kindle organization was in some ways a startup within Amazon and benefited from Jeff Bezos’s venture capital infusions, long-range vision, and full support.”
• “Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.”

While Merkoski describes himself as “the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop,” he doesn’t (and may be legally unable to) provide any inside scoops in this book. So the next best thing is when he can speak specifically about e-reading platforms — including the advantages of Amazon’s competitors. The development of the Kindle was highly secretive: “No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning,” Merkoski writes. That resulted, in 2007, in a $399 device that sold out in five and a half hours, remained out of stock for months and got a lot of mixed reviews (facts that Merkoski doesn’t mention).

Kindle’s flaws — and what competitors did better

Future versions of the Kindle improved on some flaws: Merkoski calls the Kindle 2, introduced in 2009, “truly an incredible device.” But “in fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia…Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.”

Kindle competitors, he says, have done better in lots of ways. Take Barnes & Noble: “Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They’re the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive e-ink screens…They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital. They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group.” Likewise, “companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more playful…let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle.” The winner on that front, he says, is Apple’s iPad.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes, “Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war…Competitors like Barnes & Noble and Apple have successfully blurred the lines and proven that they can provide a great media experience, so Amazon’s brand matters less in the eyes of readers now.” He says “it’s hard to love Amazon…at best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products.”

Oddly, Merkoski doesn’t mention the Nook division’s terrible performance these days, or the company’s inability to cut into Amazon’s market share. Nooks, he claims, are “downright futuristic.” And that’s really where he wants to go in this book: How will ebooks, reading and writing change?

What’s next: High-speed head plugs and a “Facebook for books”?

Let’s be clear: Merkoski loves books. An endless number of sentences like “Books are priceless,” “Books can inspire us toward greatness,” “Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some,” “Reading is an act of bathyspheric descent into the depths of an inky-black ocean,” “For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you” become increasingly irritating as the book goes on and weigh down Merkoski’s ideas on what the future of reading could actually look like.

Once you cut through the platitudes, Merkoski envisions some specific innovations that are interesting and imaginative. For instance, “the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience.” That sounds horrible to me, but another idea — a screenless e-reader that uses a pico projector to project an ebook onto a blank surface (like a ceiling or the pages of a blank book), pulls ebooks from the cloud and is navigated by voice commands — seems like something that could actually exist in a few years.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes there will be

“just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from an ebook and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link, or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading…The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes.”

The company best situated to make this dream a reality is not Amazon, Merkoski believes, but Google — thanks to its knowledge of search engines and the vast number of titles it’s scanned for Google book search, “Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library.”

For now, rights issues are in the way, and so books, “our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration, aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain books that lag by at least ninety years.” It will take “a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models,” Merkoski acknowledges, before such a hyperlinked database of books can legally exist — even though we have the technology to put it in place now.

Great UX, thwarted by walled gardens

Readmill is a great reading environment. That their designers obsess on visceral user experience makes it a true pleasure to use. It may very well be the best “feeling” ereader application out there. This is a critical attribute for an environment in which you can spend hours a day.

But it suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it.

This is a discussion less about DRM (although, it is that, too) and more about seamless user experience. Sure, you can hunt down a copy of “Gone Girl” on a website you’ve never bought a book from before. Enter your credit-card information. Download it. Then upload it to your Readmill account. Or, you can click “Buy now with 1-Click” on Amazon.com and have it on all your devices in 10 seconds, ready to be read in the Kindle reading application. You have to be really persuasive to beat that kind of convenience.

Since Amazon would never allow its library to be accessed by reading applications other than Kindle, this is a non-trivial problem for a startup like Readmill to surmount.

A community to challenge Amazon

Goodreads has always been a bit of an enigma. Truth be told, I’ve never been an avid user. There’s a number of reasons why, but the biggest is simply that the distance between my books — and the activity that happens within them — and Goodreads has always seemed ginormous. That is, updating reading statuses for books on a website always felt odd and forced. It felt odd in 2007 when I was mainly reading physical books, and it feels odder still in 2013, where I’m mainly reading Kindle books. That said, 16 million people clearly don’t agree with me.

So why did Amazon buy Goodreads? Well, the promise of a collaboration between Goodreads and a great reading platform (like Readmill) loomed large. A combination like that had the chance of being the Last Great Stand against Amazon. Goodreads is many things but most defensibly it is a community. A strong community. An engaged community. (And now, a slightly enraged community.) Sixteen million users is nothing to dismiss. It’s not Facebook or Instagram levels, but 16 million excited people is a firehose to be reckoned with. What Goodreads didn’t have was a reading application.

It also should be noted that publishers love Goodreads. No surprise there; it’s just as one would imagine. Goodreads is an amazing platform for promoting books to an avid, core readership. So if Goodreads were to develop a reading application, it doesn’t take much imagination to see them signing up the catalogs of the big five and launching a Goodreads store for the Goodreads reader. And were that reading application to plug seamlessly into the Goodreads ecosystem — the community — then getting those 16 million users to switch from Kindle to Goodreads Reader would have been one of the easier platform sells in publishing.

Goodreads users already want to hang out at Goodreads. If they could read there too — in an app — I suspect many would.

Kindle flaws present opportunity

Despite the maturity of the market, the tablet reading space is still weirdly under-polished. Kindle reading environments have hardly changed in the last three years. The Kindle app has seen some improvement — mainly in support for complex KF8 formatted titles — but the polish around the reading experience, that visceral component, for novels and other mass-market books has remained largely unchanged. Books in the Kindle applications still don’t hyphenate. And page slides still stutter ever so slightly. These are small details that add up.

Certain polish aside, Kindle’s strengths are manifold. It has a vast catalog and transactional trust. It has all our credit-card information, making purchasing seamless. It is also supremely good at cloud data — consistent and reliable storage and retrieval of our books across devices. What it doesn’t have — and no inkling or iota of — is community.

What might have been

So you can see, there was a combo here. A curious matchup. Take one of the most polished, most satisfying digital book reading applications and merge it with one of the most engaged reading-specific communities. A marketplace could have developed that might have been the first real competition against Kindle. Not one built around competing with Kindle toe-to-toe as Barnes & Noble and Kobo have attempted (and failed at), but competing on ground on which Amazon has no footing: community.

It’s a certainty that Amazon, too, saw this. Which is why the sale this week comes as little surprise. I’ve always imagined that secretly, deep down in the murky stacks of Amazon headquarters, they had a crackerjack team making kindle.amazon.com the best social reading network in the world. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just realized it would be easier to buy the one that already existed.

Craig Mod is an independent writer, designer and publisher focused on publishing and storytelling. You can follow him on Twitter @craigmod.

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to PaidContent or GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Photo courtesy Vitchanan Photography/Shutterstock.com.

“Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads is a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built,” said Guild president Scott Turow in a statement issued on Friday. Turow claims that Amazon sought to eliminate Goodreads as a future competitor and that it has “squelched” an important source of independent discussion and reviews.

It’s unlikely anything so dramatic will occur in the short term. As executives from Goodreads and Amazon told my colleague Laura Owen, the book network will remain for now a standalone site and the first goal of the merger is to “do no harm.”

The data and marketing insight Amazon receives from Goodreads is likely to strengthen the retailer’s already powerful position in book selling. The question of whether this will lead to an Amazon “monopoly” is another matter altogether. Under American rules on vertical integration, a company breaks antitrust laws only it obtains a dominant positions and abuses that position to harm consumers.

Turow and the Authors Guild have already been vociferous critics of Amazon. Last year, Turow accused the company of using discounting to “destroy bookselling.” More recently, the Guild joined with the Association of American Publishers to demand that Amazon be denied control over new internet suffixes “.book” and “.author.”

Goodreads, which is based in San Francisco and launched in 2007, has 16 million members. The site lets readers keep track of the books they’ve read and want to read; rate and review books; and discover reading recommendations. Following the acquisition, Goodreads will remain headquartered in San Francisco.

Goodreads has served as a fairly “neutral” hub for readers until now — a place where publishers and authors can market and promote their books without being tied to a specific retailer. Until 2012, Goodreads sourced all of its book data from Amazon, but it then decided that the company’s API had become too restrictive and switched its data provider to the book wholesaler Ingram. “Our goal is to be an open place for all readers to discover and buy books from all retailers, both online and offline,” Goodreads told me at the time of the switch. While being an “open place for all readers” may still be Goodreads’ goal, it’s now clearly tied to promoting books for sale on Amazon.

“I wanted to assure you that Goodreads and the team behind it are not going away. We have no plans to change the Goodreads experience and Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community we all cherish,” Goodreads CEO Chandler wrote on the company’s blog. “Partnering with Amazon will help us focus on making Goodreads an even better place for readers.”

Goodreads is also likely to be less open with access to its data now that it has been acquired by Amazon. In the past, the company has shared information about how its readers discover and buy books and about their digital reading habits, presenting the data at conferences and in blog posts. This past February, for instance, CEO Chandler noted that ebook readers experiment with platforms — a significant percentage of Kindle users, for example, also buy ebooks from Apple’s iBookstore. All of this data is certainly useful for Amazon to have, but the retailer is not likely to see a reason for Goodreads to share the data with others (and with Amazon’s competitors).

Amazon acquired another reading site, Shelfari, in 2008.

This story was updated several times on Thursday afternoon.

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

The card in question, from a company called SmellYourMum (SYM), read, “You’re a c*nt. Sorry, I meant to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” although without the asterisk I inserted (this is a family website, after all). This was shown in an image, with the text alongside it including the aforementioned asterisk.

SYM claimed the ad wasn’t offensive because of “the specific context of it appearing on a humorous card intended for close friends or family.” Amazon chimed in saying the card was “meant as a bit of light-hearted, irreverent fun,” but also went a step further, arguing that the ad in question wasn’t an ad at all, but a product listing.

Nonetheless, the ASA said it qualified as an ad and therefore fell under its remit. It said the use of the c-word was “so likely to offend that it should not be used at all in marketing communications even when it was relevant to the name of the product.”

Interestingly, part of the problem here is that Amazon doesn’t have an adults-only category for products carried on its site. SYM also noted that Amazon didn’t provide a way for it to censor the image, which showed the asterisk-free version of the card’s message (that said, the ASA said even the asterisked version was too offensive).

There are many products in Amazon’s UK store that would probably fall foul of the precedent here. So the question is, is this just excessive censorship, or does the regulator have a point here?

If a physical shop carried a poster for such a card in its window, there is little doubt that people would complain. And although the ASA said the offensive word should not even be used in marketing communications, I suspect that the card’s listing in a printed catalog would not have elicited such a complaint to the advertising regulator in the first place.

The ruling leaves Amazon in a difficult position, due to the breadth of third-party products carried in its store. It doesn’t help that the ruling also comes in the same month in which Amazon U.S. was found to be advertising algorithmically-generated but nonetheless appalling “Keep calm and rape a lot” T-shirts. If there’s much more of this kind of pressure, Amazon may have to be a bit more proactive about screening the products it carries, or at least adjust the way in which it advertises them.

Amazon presents “Send to Kindle” as an alternative to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper:

“The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.”

The new feature for websites is the most recent in a line of read-it-later services Amazon has launched. Last year, the company announced a “Send to Kindle” button for Google Chrome, and later added support for Firefox. And users can already email files to their Kindles or transmit them using desktop apps. But the browser extensions — and now the web app for publishers — are Amazon’s effort to make the Kindle and Kindle apps an easy way to read all types of content, not just ebooks.

Developers who want to add the button can do so here, and the WordPress plugin is here.

“In this digital age, we don’t see why authors should have to wait six months to be paid,” Amazon’s VP of publishing Jeff Belle wrote in the letter. “Beginning with our March payment cycle, we will move to paying our authors on a monthly basis. More specifically: each month’s royalties will be released within 60 days of the end of that month, every month.  For example, royalties for sales in January will be released by March 31, royalties for sales in February will be released by April 30, etc.”

Most publishing houses pay royalties twice a year. Authors who self-publish through Amazon’s KDP and Createspace lready receive monthly royalties.

Belle also wrote that “Based on sales in February, Amazon Publishing now ranks as the 5th largest publisher on the U.S. Kindle platform (excluding free downloads but including KOLL loans, for which we pay authors).”

Full letter:

Friends,

The team at Amazon Publishing has been working to continually improve our business, with the goal of turning efficiencies into higher author royalties, faster payments and even more support for the books we publish.  Building a new business can take time and patience, and the feedback and encouragement we’ve received along the way from you has been invaluable in making us better.

We’re particularly excited to tell you about upcoming changes to the way we pay royalties.  In this digital age, we don’t see why authors should have to wait six months to be paid.  Beginning with our March payment cycle, we will move to paying our authors on a monthly basis.  More specifically: each month’s royalties will be released within 60 days of the end of that month, every month.  For example, royalties for sales in January will be released by March 31, royalties for sales in February will be released by April 30, etc.

We recognize this may create a little extra paperwork in some cases, but we feel this change is in the best interests of authors — we hope you’ll agree.  As with any such change in our business, our tireless Author Relations team is standing by to answer any questions you may have on this topic.

In other news, 2013 is off to a strong start.  Based on sales in February, Amazon Publishing now ranks as the 5th largest publisher on the US Kindle platform (excluding free downloads but including KOLL loans, for which we pay authors).  The latest book to reach the 100,000 copy threshold is 47North’s THE MONGOLIAD: BOOK ONE, the first installment in the epic Foreworld saga, written by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, Mark Teppo, Nicole Galland and Cooper Moo, which surpassed 100,000 copies in February.  Similarly, CRAZY LITTLE THING by Montlake author Tracy Brogan continues up the Kindle charts, also surpassing 100,000 copies in the last week of February.  Another Montlake bestseller, NOT QUITE DATING by Catherine Bybee exceeded the 100,000 copy milestone just last week as well.  Also of note is Christina McKenna’s “wittily and winningly-detailed” debut novel THE MISREMEMBERED MAN, which we acquired from Toby Press and re-published under AmazonEncore in 2010, re-entered the Kindle Top 10 in February on the strength of our backlist promotion, and is now on the verge of the 100,000 copy mark as a result.

Our AmazonCrossing imprint has also been on a roll lately. In January, THE BEGGAR KING by Oliver Pötzsch, the third installment in the bestselling Hangman’s Daughter series, debuted in the Kindle Top 10 to outstanding reviews, and just today surpassed 100,000 copies.  Translated from German by Lee Chadeayne, the Hangman’s Daughter series has been a breakout success, with over 800,000 copies sold to date (and occupying the top 4 slots in the US Kindle store, as of this writing).  In February, we launched the latest in our series of translations from Icelandic with REPLY TO A LETTER FROM  HELGA by Bergsveinn Birgisson, which garnered immediate praise as “a stunning work of art — resonant, earthy, heartbreaking”.  Meanwhile, in the other direction, our translations from English into German continue to surpass our expectations as well.  ABDUCTED by T.R. Ragan, itself a Kindle bestseller in the US and UK, was translated into German by AmazonCrossing as IM NETZ DES SPINNENMANNS in November, where it quickly reached #1 in our German Kindle store (combined English and German copies have already surpassed 100,000).  In all, for the month of February, six AmazonCrossing titles reached the Kindle Top 10 in Germany.

Meanwhile, Kindle Serials also continues to outperform our expectations.  Since the release of the first episode in its serialization, OPTION TO KILL by Andrew Peterson has sold over 70,000 copies and is now available as a complete book in both Kindle and trade paperback. And we are excited to see PINES, Blake Crouch’s Kindle bestseller, which has been called a “genre-bending, completely riveting thrill ride” of a novel, going into development at Fox and FX, with the pilot to be directed by M. Night Shamalyan.

We’re pleased with this strong growth overall, and in particular the results of our US and German translation publishing businesses, as well as Kindle Serials.  And yet we are also quite aware of the many improvements and inventions that lie ahead —as always your feedback is welcome and appreciated.  If you have any suggestions or questions about the new royalties process, or anything else about Amazon Publishing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.  –Jeff

Jeff Belle
Vice President
Amazon Publishing