Analysts had expected earnings of $0.07 per share on revenue of $16.1 billion.

Operating income, considered by investors to be a key measure of the company’s financial health, was $181 million, down 6 percent from the previous year. Still, that figure beat the range of -$285 million to $65 million that the company had provided in the previous quarter.

Amazon is reportedly working on a set-top box, and in the release, CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted Amazon’s expansion into original television, focusing on the company’s recent release of 14 original pilots. “Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production,” he said. “We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

North American media revenues totaled $2.51 billion for the quarter, up 14.4 percent over last year. International media revenues were $2.54 billion, up just 1.27 percent.

For the second quarter of 2013, Amazon advises investors to inspect revenues between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion, with broad guidance on operating income ranging from -$340 million to $10 million.

Amazon is holding an investor call at 2:00 PM PT, and we will be on the call.

This post was updated several times on Thursday afternoon.

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.

The new investment brings the total amount of money that Business Insider has raised to $18.3 million. In the memo to staff, Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget writes, “This capital will allow us to continue to invest aggressively in many areas of the business, including editorial, tech/product, sales and marketing, subscriptions, and events. As we mentioned last night, it will also allow us to expand our office.”

Blodget tells AllThingsD that “the new deal values the company above the $50 million valuation it earned during its last round in 2011.”

Business Insider reportedly lost about $3 million, or a quarter of its revenue, in 2012, though Blodget says the site turned a small profit in the first quarter of this year. Business Insider is known for its short news pieces and slideshows. According to the BI memo, Jeff Bezos said that he “sees some parallels with Amazon.” Blodget said the site will now include a disclosure statement whenever it writes about Amazon.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, released Tuesday. “After five years, ebooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just five percent.”

That’s impressive growth, but as the ebook transition moves forward, Amazon should worry that Kindle is not going to be the device leading the revolution. Apple and iPad will cut into its growth.

Amazon has mastered the art of the press release that doesn’t say much. Several data points are missing from Bezos’s statement — here are some questions I have:

• What’s Amazon’s actual ebook revenue? The company’s worldwide media sales were $19.9 billion in 2012; what percentage of that came from ebooks, and what percentage came from print books?
• What was print book growth for the entire year — and for past years? Bezos refers to annual ebook sales, but print book sales for just one month. Print books are also starting from a much larger base; they make up over 70 percent of trade book sales in the U.S.
• Which ebook categories are growing the fastest?
• Where’s the ebook growth coming from? 70 percent growth is a lot. Is most of it coming from within the U.S. or internationally? And is it coming from owners of Amazon devices — Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets — or is it coming from iPad and other tablet owners reading ebooks with Kindle apps?

Amazon’s not going to answer those questions (though I did ask them), but they’re important in part because U.S. book publishers are reporting slowing sales of adult ebooks: What was once triple-digit growth has fallen to the double digits. The revolution has also been largely limited to text-based titles — adult fiction and nonfiction — and categories like cookbooks and travel haven’t seen nearly as much growth from ebooks.

If the digital market for certain kinds of books is settling, as it appears to be, Amazon will have to find growth in other areas (though it doesn’t have to, and likely can’t, sustain 70 percent ebook growth for long). The company can expand Kindle internationally, as it’s been doing already, and it can still grab a certain number of ebook newbies.

Eventually, though, Amazon will have to tackle the genres that have remained rooted in print — children’s books and heavily illustrated books like cookbooks, coffee-table books and the huge textbook market. The company clearly sees potential on the children’s front: It’s launched new children’s book imprints and offerings like Kindle Free Time Unlimited. And Kindle Format 8 supports HTML5 and illustrated content.

But the biggest company it has to compete with in this area is Apple. Publishers of heavily illustrated content — both traditional publishers and digital-focused startups — are likely to focus on developing for iPad first, since it’s by far the most popular tablet. The next five years of the ebook revolution are not going to look like the first five.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Stacie Stauff Smith Photography 

Net income for the quarter was $97 million, or $0.21 per share, on revenue of $21.27 billion — compared to profits of $177 million on revenue of $17.43 billion a year ago. Operating income rose 45 percent to $405 million.

Analysts had expected earnings of $0.27 per share on revenues of $22.3 billion, and $506 million in operating income.

In the release, CEO Jeff Bezos called out ebooks in particular: “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting. After five years, ebooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast — up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent.” The company didn’t share actual ebook numbers, but North American media revenues were $2.9 billion for the quarter and $9.19 billion for the year — up 13 percent and 15 percent, respectively, over 2011. International media revenues were $3.6 billion for the quarter and $10.75 billion for the year.

As usual, Amazon did not disclose Kindle device sales. The company released new Kindle Fire tablets and the Paperwhite e-reader in September 2012. The earnings release noted that Kindle Fire HD is still “the #1 best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product” on the site, but didn’t tout any specific holiday sales nuggets the way it did in 2011. In an investor call following the earnings report, CFO Tom Szkutak said the company wasn’t able to fulfill all the orders it got for Kindle Paperwhite: “We would have had more sales in Q4 if we were able to keep up with the demand, and so the team is working very hard to make sure we have good in-stock going forward on that product.”

North American sales of electronics and other general merchandise were $8.5 billion for the quarter and $23.27 billion for the year — up 24 percent and 34 percent, respectively, over 2011.

Sales of Amazon Web Services — which get lumped into the “other” category —  looked like a bright spot for the quarter. “Other” sales in North America logged $769 million for the quarter, up 68 percent from $459 million a year earlier. That category also includes things like branded credit cards, but most analysts say AWS makes up the bulk of the number. However, it’s unclear how profitable AWS is.

For the full year, revenue was $61.09 billion, up 27 percent from 2011. Operating income fell for the full year to $676 million, from $862 million in 2011. The company saw a net loss of $39 million compared to net income of $631 million the previous year.

For the first quarter of 2013, the company told investors to expect revenues between $15 billion and $16.6 billion, with guidance on operating income ranging from -$285 million to $65 million.

A previous version of this story stated Amazon’s revenues in millions, not billions. I’ve now fixed that. The story was updated several times throughout the afternoon and during the investor call.

Amazon is holding an investor call at 2 p.m. PT, and we will be on the call.

Kilar had spent a lot of time next to Amazon’s maverick CEO Jeff Bezos and he learned well from the master of disruption. Like Bezos, he focused on playing the long game and ignored the naysayers.

He used his rolodex to hire the right people. He went to China and acquired a piece of technology to roll out Hulu to the masses at a breakneck speed. Most importantly, the team at Hulu built a simple, elegant and easy to use a minimalistic service: which no one expected. It was so good and I was so wrong. And glad I was, for when I was recovering from my illness in 2008, Hulu became a constant bedside companion.

There are some in Silicon Valley who ask me why I am a fan of Kilar. Here is why:

• Hollywood is about profit maximization even at the expense of paying public.
• Silicon Valley is about building a great consumer experience and build profits in the long term. Google and Amazon are two perfect examples.

Jason was able to marry both those constituencies. Don’t believe me? Just look at the site’s financial performance: at the end of 2012 it had three million Hulu plus subscribers and about $695 million in revenue. The number of paying subscribers for Hulu Japan tripled in comparison to 2011.

With so much good news, it perhaps was the right time for Kilar to announce that he is going to be leaving the company sometime during the first quarter of 2013. It is not as big a shock for his departure has been rumored for a while, especially since the company’s big media owners recently completed a buyout of co-owner Providence Equity. Hulu’s co-owners including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney and News Corp., have been plotting the future without Kilar.

Herding cats

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar with former CTO Eric Feng

Many of my sources have told me that Kilar was more like a UN peacemaker and trying to organize board meetings with the media-doyens was a nightmare. A Fast Company profile last year pointed out that Kilar had skills to manage up. But things went progressively south after the exit of Peter Chernin, the News Corp. COO who was the heavy on the board and who loved the concept of Hulu. That Kilar survived and helped turn Hulu into a business that 3-million people want to pay for is a testimony to his (and his team’s) skills.

My initial skepticism of this big consortium came from years of observing such beasts of burden trample over saplings of innovation, mostly because the new way threatened their established business practices. At the turn of the century, a Silicon Valley company called @Home Networks had a bold idea: send broadband via cables owned by cable networks. The idea was backed by the likes of John Doerr and soon all big cable companies such as Tele-Communications Inc. (later acquired by AT&T, which was in turn gulped by Comcast) became investors in @Home Networks.

While @Home suffered from adult management, it was the cable companies which essentially killed the pioneer. Once they learned that they could buffer their profits by selling broadband, they proceeded to kill the baby they had helped birth.

Show must go on

Having seen that movie before, I knew that Hulu would have similar problems. With Jason gone and private equity investors having locked in their profits, get ready for the egotistical media companies get their evil way with Hulu.

Kilar will leave Hulu at an interesting juncture. The rise of multiscreen households has turned the video business on its head. The relevance of the older media distribution channels is on the wane and we are transitioning to broadband and web. Think about it this way: world’s biggest live event didn’t happen on ESPN, Fox or NBC. Instead it was YouTube that hosted the Felix Baumgartner’s space jump. South Korean pop star Psy has had a billion views on YouTube. I bet you the top 100 artists have not received that kind of attention on MTV.

The fact is that we are looking at a world where Netflix and Amazon Prime along with YouTube are the cynosure of attention when it comes to video. Hulu has it for now, but its big media owners have their legacy businesses to protect. They need to make the TV station owners happy. They need to fleece the cable customers by selling them packages no one wants.

Hulu was their bridge to the future — but large media companies suffer from a weird kind of astigmatism.  They are businesses set up to serve other businesses — movie theaters, cable companies, satellite companies, DVD sellers and now on-demand video providers. That is why they can’t put viewers first, even if they want to.

Too bad, Kilar isn’t going to be there to look out for viewing public.

If you’re an Amazon devotee you have to hope this honor isn’t the equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover jinx because as successful as Amazon is — in online retail, in publishing, and in cloud infrastructure services — it faces very big challenges.

For one thing, the sales tax advantage Amazon’s retail business has enjoyed for 16 years is evaporating as more states are forcing it to charge sales taxes on in-state purchases. That could erase some of its traditional advantages over brick-and-mortar stores.

And, Amazon Web Services, the company’s giant IT infrastructure business, faces growing competition as well from players like Rackspace, IBM, VMware, Joyent, SoftLayer and others. In addition, at a time when AWS is trying to lure more enterprise workloads, it’s seen its share of embarrassing snafus including an issue at its US-East data center on Christmas Eve which brought down Netflix streaming video. Netflix is both a big Amazon customer and a rival to Amazon Prime Instant Video service.

Perhaps most worrisome for Amazon is that Google, the one company that many people say can challenge AWS on pure scale, appears to be serious about competing in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) fray.

But back to the list: Bezos rose to the No. 2 spot on HBR’s roster this year, from No. 7 in 2010. According to the authors:

“Under his leadership, the company delivered industry-adjusted shareholder returns of 12,266% and saw its value increase by $111 billion. In recent years the online retailer has expanded aggressively into new segments such as cloud-based computing services, while working to get the most out of the markets it already occupies. Its revenue growth shows no signs of slowing: Sales increased by 40% in 2011.”

The authors acknowledge that Bezos, who prioritizes consumers over shareholders, “vexes” Wall Street at times. (No kidding, take a look at all the “dump Amazon” posts on Seeking Alpha), but that Amazon, the online-retail-giant-now-IT-services-provider, has done well by long-term investors. And, long-term thinking is something Bezos talks up a lot, including last month at the AWS: Reinvent event in Las Vegas, and is also a focus of the HBR Top CEO list.

Another interesting tidbit from this year’s list: Meg Whitman, the embattled CEO of Hewlett-Packard is the top-ranked female CEO, coming in No. 9 out of 100 overall.

If you’re not a Netflix subscriber, you may not yet know that issues at Amazon’s US-East data center facility took down Netflix’ streaming service on Christmas Eve — arguably the worst possible time. Starting at 1:50 p.m. PST, as GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers reported, Amazon’s US east facility reported issues with its Elastic Load Balancing service that carried over into Christmas morning.  Interestingly, Amazon Prime Instant Video streaming service, which competes head-on with Netflix and which also runs on AWS, appeared to be unaffected by the US East snafus.

Wait… AWS outage took Netflix offline, but Amazon video stayed up? What the huh?—
Rafe Needleman (@Rafe) December 25, 2012

Update 9:55 a.m. PST: One commenter from Mass. reported his Amazon Prime Instant Video was down for two days. I was able to access that service this morning with no problem. Stay tuned for updates on this.

The latest update to the AWS status page reads:

Dec 25, 4:36 AM PST We continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. These issues are affecting updates to both existing and newly created ELBs. A subset of ELBs that made configuration changes or changes to registered instances during the event are experiencing errors or receiving reduced traffic. We continue to work toward a full recovery of the service. We apologize for the continued impact.

Other sites, including Heroku’s Platform as a Service, were also affected. Heroku, like Netflix, have been down this path before with previous AWS US East glitches.

Heroku, if you were a character on South Park, I would call you Kenny.Every time AWS has an episode you're killed. bit.ly/U7pu9w—
Brian McCallion (@BrianMcCallion) December 25, 2012

This, the latest of several problems at Amazon’s Ashburn, Virg. facility, highlights a couple big, recurring issues for Amazon, its partners, rivals, and customers.

1:  US-East is Amazon’s largest and oldest data center facility and perhaps not coincidentally it’s also the facility at ground zero of most of the AWS-related outages over the past few years. Still, many customers feel they have no choice but to deploy there since it’s usually the first AWS data center to host new services (For example, Amazon’s new high-storage instance types announced last week are only available from US-East for now.) And US-East tends to be less pricey than Amazon US-West facilities in California and Oregon.

2: Working with AWS now is a lot like a software company partnering with Microsoft in the 80s and 90s — it’s both your biggest partner and your biggest rival so tread carefully.  At AWS: Reinvent last month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touched on this topic of “coopetition.”  Amazon Prime Instant Video competes with Netflix but “we bust our butts every day for Netflix,” Bezos said.

3: Issues like this one can only help AWS rivals in the OpenStack community — Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard et al that are trying to position their cloud services as options with better service and support, if not the same huge scale as AWS.  Partners might also take a harder look at other infrastructure providers like SoftLayer and Joyent. Just saying.

Update: At 8:45 a.m. PST Dec. 25: Netflix tweeted:

Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We’re back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 25, 2012

Update: At 6:49 p.m.  PST Dec. 26, an AWS spokeswoman got back with a statement:

“On December 24, AWS experienced issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service that impacted some customers in the US-East region. Impacted customers started to recover the evening of December 24 and the service was fully recovered and functioning correctly on December 25.  We have been heads down ensuring customers are operating smoothly and will be publishing a full summary of the event in the coming days.

Amazon Instant Video wasn’t significantly impacted because it didn’t need to take any Amazon Elastic Load Balancing scaling events during the time there were issues with the Elastic Load Balancing service in US-East. Only Elastic Load Balancers that were scaling up or down had issues during that time period.”

On Friday the bestselling author Tim Ferriss, whose book The Four-Hour Chef will be published by Amazon’s New York imprint on November 20, entered into a marketing promotion with BitTorrent. A BitTorrent blog post proudly proclaims: “It’s poised to be the most banned book in U.S. history. The 4-Hour Chef is one of the first titles underneath Amazon’s new publishing imprint; boycotted by U.S. booksellers, including Barnes & Noble.” The same “banned book” point is repeated in the materials sent to press, which include the following “points to consider”: “It’s a significant marketing partnership, particularly in light of the ban of the book by Barnes & Noble and others.” And “Similar promotions for recording artists generated downloads in the tens of millions amongst BitTorrent users, offering a significant lift in awareness and sales.”

So is Barnes & Noble banning The Four-Hour Chef because of its controversial content? Not so much. Ferriss’s book is simply one of several that Barnes & Noble will not stock in its stores because it is published by Amazon. As Barnes & Noble announced earlier this year, “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain ebooks to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content.” Other booksellers, too — both chains like Books-A-Million and small independent stores — do not stock Amazon titles because, as Books Inc. owner Michael Tucker recently put it to the New York Times, “At a certain point you have to decide how far you want to nail your own coffin shut.” Tim Ferriss himself told me last week, “Do I blame [Barnes & Noble]? No. If I were in their shoes, would I do the same thing? Maybe.” Update: Ferriss responded to my concerns about the promotion in an email:

I view things through a different lens. I think the implications of this boycott or ban — choose the word you prefer — are larger then people realize. If this book fails due to a retail stonewall, I can tell you for a fact that more than a dozen A-list authors I know will hit pause on plans for publishing innovation for the next few years. Is The 4-Hour Chef the same as Huckleberry Finn?  Of course not, and I never implied that it was. But do I view stifling innovation and free speech (through distribution of otherwise) as a malevolent thing? Yes. Regardless of the motive (moral, economic, etc.), the outcome is the same: regress instead of progress. And regress snowballs quickly. At the end of the day, I want people to think about boycotting and banning, both historically and moving forward. The fact that you wrote a piece about precisely that — raising awareness and stimulating conversation — is a great thing. That public discourse is one of my goals. Last, I’d be remiss not to point out: booksellers use banned books as a marketing gimmick every year as a matter of course. Yes, I’m using the media to highlight what I view as a serious fork in the road for content creators. But if anyone is guilty of using “banned books” as a gimmick, it’s booksellers themselves.

Readers can still order Amazon titles from Barnes & Noble’s website and most independent bookstores will order them if readers ask. Barnes & Noble’s policy is a business decision — just the way Amazon’s marketing campaign last December, which gave shoppers a discount if they walked into bricks-and-mortar stores and scanned products with the Amazon Price Check app, was a business decision. (Neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble responded to a request for comment for this piece.)

“Disruptive voices should be heard,” BitTorrent proclaims. (Conveniently, according to today’s issue of Fortune, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is this year’s “ultimate disruptor.”) And “we’ll be asking users to support Tim and the Amazon imprint.”

“Where books are burned, in the end people will burn”: That line, from the German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, is engraved on a plaque at Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the site where the Nazis burned thousands of books in 1933. The disruptors who do speak out for Ferriss won’t be risking personal harm. They won’t be standing up against free speech. Ferriss approached Amazon for a book deal and in four days, it will be published. That’s not exactly censorship.

After a week of testing the Kindle Paperwhite, I agree with Amazon: I found myself turning on the light regularly, at various levels of brightness, not just at night. It just makes the Kindle that much more usable and convenient: On a dim subway or in a badly lit room, you can read comfortably.

I found the Paperwhite — which starts at $119 for the ad-supported, WiFi version and will ship toward the end of October if you order it today – to be a huge improvement over my Kindle Touch. Here’s my video review:

Here are a few more details on things that I liked and didn’t like:

Likes

• The Paperwhite feels great right out of the box. It’s smoother and easier to grip than the Touch. The screen feels better, too —  it has a pleasantly grainy (for lack of a better word) feel as you swipe your finger down it.
• It’s faster. The touchscreen is quicker and more responsive (see my video for an example of this). On the Touch, I sometimes tap twice because the screen is slow to register that I’ve touched it. The Paperwhite still doesn’t offer iPad-like quickness, but its response time is a big improvement over the Touch
• The screen has a higher resolution and better contrast (even with the light off), which makes type easier to read. There are new fonts and, because of the higher resolution, you can read comfortably at a lower type size on the Paperwhite than on the Touch.
• The Paperwhite’s upgraded software is great. Watch the video for a few examples of how it differs from the older software on the Kindle Touch, but I like that “cloud” has replaced the confusing “archived items” and that books are displayed by their covers rather than in a list of text. I asked Amazon if we can expect the software upgrade on older Kindles, but a company spokeswoman wouldn’t share details about upcoming plans.
• PDFs are easier to read. If you email PDFs to your Kindle often, you know that screwy formatting can make them annoying to read. This is improved on the Paperwhite and Amazon confirmed it’s “working hard to continue to improve performance and usability for PDFs.”
• The light is wonderful (though I wish it were a little easier to adjust; see below). When the light’s on, the LEDs are faintly visible at the bottom of the screen, but I did not find that bothersome.
• Amazon shipped my Paperwhite review unit with a review case, too — the $39.99 Kindle Paperwhite Leather Cover. Like the newer iPad cases, this cover is magnetic. When you close it, the Paperwhite goes sleep; open the cover and it wakes back up. This is very convenient. If you don’t want to pay $39.99 for a case, wait, since I’m sure other manufacturers will release competing, cheaper magnetic Kindle cases soon.
• I have absolutely no problem with the ads on my Touch or on the Paperwhite I tested. They’re almost completely nonintrusive and they don’t show up when you are reading. If you’re in the market for a new Kindle, buy one with ads and see if they bother you; if you don’t like them, you can pay to turn them off). ou might as well order the cheaper model and see if they bother you.

Dislikes

• I love the light but wish that it adjusted automatically depending on the brightness of a room. Failing that, I wish there were brightness controls on the side of the Paperwhite (where the volume controls are on the iPad) so that you could adjust the brightness as you read. Since you can only access the brightness controls through the touchscreen, you have to interrupt your reading to adjust the light.
• I miss the physical home button — the Touch has one but it’s gone on the Paperwhite. Instead you have to tap the top of the screen and then press the home icon. I’m used to reading on the Touch and kept automatically tapping the Paperwhite’s logo (where the home button is on the Touch). I get that this is a touchscreen device, but just a couple buttons would actually make things easier.
• This has been written before, but it’s annoying that Amazon continues to sell the power adapter separately ($9.99). If you already have an adapter for an older Kindle, though, it will also work with the Paperwhite. (Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble dropped the price of the Nook with GlowLight to $119 today and is sure to note that the power adapter is included.)

As I noted above, if you order it today the Kindle Paperwhite will ship toward the end of October. Those who pre-ordered it when Amazon announced it in early September, though, may have received shipping notices today and will get their new Kindles in a couple days.