That is apparently about to change, according to Amazon.com, which has posted two different images hinting that “Wizardry is on the way.”

In one of the images, there is a picture of an owl, similar to Hedwig, Harry Potter’s loyal companion and courier. In another — found at the top of the Kindle eBook store — it restates that “Wizardry is on the way.”

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment, saying, “We’ll have to ask you to stay tuned for an upcoming announcement.”

Update: Amazon has officially announced that starting June 19, all seven Harry Potter books (in five languages) will be added to the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Members of Amazon Prime will be able to borrow the books for free.

Presumably, there is still pent-up demand for the electronic copies since the bestsellers have not yet been for sale directly on Amazon or the Kindle.

In March, Amazon announced that all seven of the books would become available, but that consumers would have to buy them directly from J.K. Rowling’s online bookstore called Pottermore and then download them to their e-reader. Despite the inconvenience, Pottermore sold more than £1 million worth  (roughly $1.6 million) of e-books in three days.

Because they were being distributed directly from Pottermore to customers, the Harry Potter series has never appeared on the Muggle bestseller list — I mean, Kindle.

Nick DiCarlo, VP of product planning for Samsung Mobile, noted that the market has shown that, despite Apple’s pronouncements, there is a demand for a range of tablets, including smaller, 7-inch models. DiCarlo also noted that the company knows how to quickly come from behind. It wasn’t that long ago that his company had only a tiny part of the phone market and it is now a serious player. He said he sees the same thing happening in the tablet space.

“I think it is very, very early days,” DiCarlo said in a CTIA panel moderated by AllThingsD co-Executive Editor Walt Mossberg.

Taking aim at his main rival, Jamie Iannone, president of digital products for Barnes & Noble, said that the Nook Tablet clearly outshines the Kindle Fire in a head-to-head comparison.

Iannone noted that its color tablet is a second-generation product designed specifically for reading, while Amazon used another manufacturer’s design.

“As you know, the Fire was built off a reference-design product to get it out quickly,” Iannone said, adding that the product suffered as a result.

As for Apple, Iannone noted that many iPad owners also have one of its E-Ink Nook devices because the iPad isn’t ideal for long-form reading.

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The global payments provider is making the announcement tonight at a special event tied to CTIA, the wireless industry’s annual conference in New Orleans.

MasterCard is the latest — but probably not the last — to unveil its plans for the future of credit card transactions.

To date, a host of other competitors, spanning Visa, American Express, PayPal, Google and the U.S. wireless carriers, have also made announcements.

While all of the payment companies are approaching the digital wallet space with a slightly different product, from the consumer’s perspective they all end up looking somewhat the same — like PayPal.

In the case of MasterCard, PayPass Wallet will allow consumers to buy things online without having to memorize a 16-digit card number or in person by tapping a payment terminal with their phone. The solution is similar to Visa’s V.me digital wallet and American Express’s Serve-branded wallet.

For example, when checking out online with retailers that support PayPass, consumers can choose to enter a username and password to access their wallet. The PayPass Wallet will support multiple accounts, including competing payment providers.

“We spent a lot of time on the underlying technology,” said Ed McLaughlin, MasterCard’s chief emerging payments officer, in an interview. “It is designed for our partners to make sure consumers have a great experience online or in-store on your app. The ability to use any device you have and any account you’d want to invoke is a different approach to the closed-loop accounts.”

MasterCard will allow consumers to sign up for the wallet on its site, but it is primarily relying on banks to get users interested. This summer, it will be going live with the help of a dozen or so banks worldwide, including Citibank. Other major merchants are committing to adding PayPass to their online checkout systems, including American Airlines, Barnes & Noble and Newegg.

Mark Hung, a research director at Gartner, said it’s natural for MasterCard, American Express and Visa to move from the physical world of payments to online because consumers are already entering their credit card number online to check out. “They would like to see the same user experience, whether they are transacting online or offline,” he said.

With banks and retailers on board, Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with Aite Group, said the focus for MasterCard will have to be on getting consumers interested in signing up.

“There’s definitely going to be some risk of consumer confusion,” Oglesby said, given the dozen of digital wallet options. “They are going to have to invest quite a lot in branding. … Even though the traditional payment companies are entering the space, the brands are relatively unknown. There will be confusion for consumers and merchants alike, and therefore, will require a signficant investment in terms of investing in new brands.”

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Redmond will put $300 million into the new business at a $1.7 billion valuation, and will get 17.6 percent of the new company. That will leave Barnes & Noble with a stake in the new unit worth about $1.4 billion.

That’s nearly $600 million more than the value the market placed on all of Barnes & Noble until today. Not surprisingly, Barnes & Noble investors love this idea, and are bidding up the stock a staggering 80 percent this morning.

(Update: For now, this isn’t a formal spinoff, and the new unit will remain a Barnes & Noble subsidiary. It’s reasonable to assume that Barnes & Noble and Microsoft will attempt to formally cleave the digital unit into a standalone company down the road, though the release announcing the deal includes plenty of hedging language in case that doesn’t happen: “The company intends to explore all alternatives for how a strategic separation of Newco may occur. There can be no assurance that the review will result in a strategic separation or the creation of a stand-alone public company, and there is no set timetable for this review.”)

A few details:

• The new company will also include Barnes & Noble’s college book-selling unit.
• Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 OS will now include a Nook app.
• The deal includes a settlement to a patent battle between the two companies. It’s worth noting that the Nook runs on a “forked” version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

The deal is a bit of a magic trick for Barnes & Noble, which will manage to extract an extraordinary amount of value from a business that didn’t exist a few years ago — and will now have a currency to help it compete for Silicon Valley talent.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, which had completely ceded the e-reader market to Amazon, Apple and everyone else, gets into the business via a very small investment.

Over the past year, Amazon has slowly been entering that space, aiming to go up against industry-leading Groupon.

So far, it has done fairly well. For example, Amazon is the fourth-largest daily deal provider in the U.S., following Groupon, LivingSocial and Travelzoo, according to Yipit, a deal aggregator that closely tracks the major players.

Starting early tomorrow, the company is planning a publicity stunt to raise its awareness even further, by posting $10 Amazon.com gift cards for five bucks.

The offer will be distributed on the AmazonLocal site, via email and on some Kindle devices, and has the potential to sell out, since limited quantities will be available. (Don’t get too excited, it’s limited to one per customer.)

As part of the promotion, Mark Eamer, a director of product at AmazonLocal, provided a glimpse into the company’s plans in the crowded local deals space (but that’s pretty good, considering the company’s corporate culture to not disclose much of anything).

Offering gift cards is a common way for companies in the space to drum up new subscribers, even though the companies often lose money. For example, last year, LivingSocial sold 1.3 million $20 Amazon gift cards for $10 apiece, Groupon pawned discounts for Barnes & Noble, and more recently, Google offered up gift cards from REI.

Eamer said this represents the first time it has sold gift cards for Amazon.com, but in the past, it has sold deals for other Amazon-owned properties, such as Diapers.com and Soap.com.

Up until now, most of AmazonLocal’s growth has been supported by the $175 million strategic investment it made two years ago in LivingSocial. Nine months ago, Amazon launched its first local deals site in Boise, Idaho, with the help of LivingSocial, and today it operates in 90 markets across 26 states and the District of Columbia.

Eamer said that even now most of the deals listed on the site come from LivingSocial, although AmazonLocal is hiring its own sales team in Seattle and in other locations to help source deals. He declined to say how many people work in the division.

Still, it’s clear that one of Amazon’s advantages in getting merchants to work with them over a competitor is its scale, he said.

Eamer would not disclose how many subscribers have signed up for AmazonLocal, but overall, the company has 164 million active customer accounts worldwide, defined as people who have made a purchase on the site in the past 12 months.

“There’s lots of competitors in this space, and we all want attention from the merchants. By far and away, they [merchants] answer the phone and want to hear what we have to say. We have relationships with millions of merchants around the world, and 164 million customers worldwide. We know how to work with merchants and connect with customers — it’s unique to Amazon.com.”

In the future, Eamer said, AmazonLocal would be open to talking to other providers beyond LivingSocial to bring more offers to the platform. “We would consider it and evaluate that as time goes on, or as another relationship presents itself,” he said.

Amazon’s success in the space is important not just because it is interested in going up against Groupon, but because it uses offers to discount the price of its hardware, including the Kindle e-readers. For instance, a Kindle Touch “with special offers” costs only $99, but one without offers — a.k.a. ads — is $139. In other words, if it can subsidize the cost of its hardware through the use of these offers, it can compete more deftly against Apple and others in the tablet space.

Another goal for the year is to continue to refine its targeting abilities. Currently, offers are only delivered to people based on geography only.

“One of our key tenets is delivering the right deal to the right person at the right time … Our targeting is limited by geography, but we’ll be working on some things in 2012.”

Of course, in the case of tomorrow’s Amazon.com gift card, it will be sent out to everyone.

Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Rakuten is set on challenging Amazon’s global dominance by appealing to the third-party merchants Amazon works with today and by growing it’s digital content business to compete with the Kindle.

We recently learned about the company’s strategy through the eyes of Neel Grover, the CEO of Buy.com, Rakuten’s online shopping subsidiary in the U.S.

For now, Rakuten is admittedly Amazon’s much smaller competitor, though it is dominant in Japan.

The publicly held company is worth $14.5 billion compared to Amazon’s $85 billion market capitalization, and it pales in comparison to Amazon’s mass in the U.S. Buy.com is ranked 410th here versus Amazon’s sixth-place standing, according to Compete.

But Grover said Rakuten has a two-part plan for going up against Amazon.

First, it will target and partner with third-party resellers and merchants.

Amazon does this, too, but often ends up competing with the merchants because it has its own warehouses and products that it is selling, he said.

“Oftentimes Amazon will compete with the retailer. [Third-party merchants] teach Amazon what to buy and sell, which is ultimately not good for the merchant,” he said.

Rakuten, on the other hand, does not own any warehouses or any inventory itself and instead gives retailers — brick and mortar or e-commerce — the tools and traffic to support their own businesses.

In May 2010, Rakuten acquired Buy.com.

“I sought out Rakuten. … I thought their model was one that would give us a unique differentiator in the U.S. and we could learn and bring their model to our site and customers,” Grover said. “We are still in the final stages of transforming, and it’s taken a bit of time to get it transformed.”

But, he confidently added, “It will win out in the long-term.”

A similar approach is being taken by eBay, another e-commerce giant in the U.S.

The second part of Rakuten’s plan is to go after Amazon’s growing digital business, spanning music, e-books and other content.

In November, the Japanese company purchased Kobo, a runner-up in the e-reader race behind the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. It paid $315 million in cash for the Canadian company.

Rakuten is banking on the Kobo in assisting with its move into providing downloadable media to consumers, starting with e-books.

At the time of the acquisition, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis told All Things D that Rakuten will give Kobo the financial backing to grow internationally, as well as compete in the U.S.

“The U.S. is absolutely important. It’s fundamental. We have millions of U.S. users today, and we plan to grow that substantially, and internationally it represents a big opportunity as well,” he said.

Earlier this month, Buy.com started linking to Kobo from its site, so that consumers have the option of buying a physical copy of a book or a digital version. Other integration efforts are also under way.

It also wants to get into other digital content, like music. Back in 1999, Buy.com was one of the original sites to have a digital music store, but Grover said it was a pretty poor experience because of all the restrictions that record labels were mandating. A lot of that has now changed.

“We are definitely looking as a group at all digital content. … We are looking at different solutions, but today we have not continued on with our initial music store,” he said.

As with Kobo and Buy.com, acquisitions are always an option, he said.

“We’ll continue to look at everything that would make our business better. It hasn’t been shy over the past two years. We have a global vision to create an e-commerce marketplace offering all goods, and we continue to see that grow.”

And going up against Amazon, some serious growth is what Rakuten and Buy.com will need.

• Nook sales are booming! They were up 70 percent over the holidays, driven by the new Nook Tablet, which apparently sold well, even though it was up against Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad.
• Nook sales are disappointing: No one wanted to buy the black-and-white Nook Touch.
• Barnes & Noble’s digital business is booming! Content sales were up 113 percent over the holidays. By the end of its fiscal year in May, B&N figures it will have sold $450 million worth of digital stuff. That will put it on an annual run rate of at least $700 million — that’s 10 percent of last year’s overall sales.
• Things are so good, in fact, that the company might spin off its Nook/digital business altogether.
• But things aren’t that good: B&N lowered its guidance for every one of its 2011 fiscal year metrics, including revenue, EBITDA, and online and offline sales. It blamed the bulk of the change on those crummy Nook Touch sales, as well as additional investments it’s making. But I’m not quite sure how poor Nook Touch sales, for instance, affected revenue at its brick-and-mortar stores.
• To spell that out: B&N says fiscal-year revenue will be $7.0 billion to $7.2 billion, down from an initial forecast of $7.4 billion. Store sales are expected to increase 1 percent, instead of 2 to 3 percent; Barnesandnoble.com sales will be up 40 percent to 50 percent, instead of 60 percent to 70 percent; and EBITDA will be $150 million to $180 million, instead of $210 million to $250 million. Losses, meanwhile, will balloon up to $1.10 to $1.40 a share, instead of the initial forecast of 10 cents to 50 cents a share.

Got all that?

Investors certainly have. Or at least they seem to have drilled down the guidance change — the second one the company has made in the last couple of months. They are punishing the stock this morning, sending it down 27 percent.

Meanwhile, at least one part of the release makes sense: Nook Touch misstep aside, B&N certainly seems to have a found a fast-growth digital business. And spinning off the business would (theoretically) help them solve at least one problem they’ve been grappling with recently: How do you recruit stars to a tech business in a red-hot labor market (for tech, that is), when you can’t dangle red-hot stock options in front of them?

Did you know, for instance, that B&N has a couple hundred people working for them on digital stuff at a Palo Alto outpost? It’s true! But if the New York-based company is going to make a real go of taking on Amazon, Apple, et al, it’s going to have to beef up that group significantly, and that means convincing people that there’s as much upside there as there would be at a Facebook or a Dropbox, etc. Tough sell, but breaking off from a no-growth dead-tree business would be a start.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Ronstik)

The book retailer has been in publishing since the 1970s and expanded the effort in 2003, when it acquired Sterling for about $115 million.

Now, however, Barnes & Noble, facing intense competition from Amazon.com Inc., is recasting itself as a technology company with emphasis on its Nook e-reading devices and its Nook tablet. The sale of Sterling would allow Barnes & Noble to focus on its core businesses.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Well, you better decide fast. For many sites, today is the final day that orders can be placed to get guaranteed delivery by Christmas.

If you are having a hard time coming up with ideas, there are plenty of Facebook applications that will offer recommendations based on a gift recipient’s interests.

Late last month, Wal-Mart launched an application called Shopycat, which does just that.

To be helpful, I got a list of Shopycat’s 20 most-recommended gifts. At the very top of the list was an unexpected item called a “personalized keepsake box” for men. The box, which costs $24.76, is designed to hold a man’s watch, jewelry, money clip and/or other items.

It’s not clear what a person’s interests would have been for this to surface at the top of so many lists (maybe the popularity of the holiday-themed Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg music video “Dick in a Box” had something to do with it?) After all, many of the other items on the list are clearly based on someone’s favorite TV shows, movies or videogames. For instance, other fun items that made the list were action figures for “The Big Lebowski,” an Angry Birds beanie and “Star Wars” bathrobes.

As for the man box, it is sold out, so clearly some people agreed with Wal-Mart that it made for a good gift.

Not all of the items are recommendations for items sold on the Wal-Mart site. It also refers shoppers to other sites, such as ThinkGeek.com, Barnes & Noble, CBSstore.com and RedEnvelope.

Wal-Mart did not say how many people have used the app since it went live last month, but given that Wal-Mart has 11 million Facebook fans, it could represent big numbers.

Here is the entire list of most-recommended gifts for 2011:

1. Personalized Keepsake Box
2. “Star Wars” Jedi & Sith Bathrobes
3. Personalized “Home is Where your Story Begins” Canvas
4. “Twilight: Director’s Notebook: The Story of How We Made the Movie”
5. 3-Pointer Basketball Tin
6. “House” Cane Ornament
7. “Harry Potter” Clue
8. Men’s Comfy Feet Miami Dolphins
9. “How I Met Your Mother” MacLaren’s Irish Pub Shot Glass
10. OtterBox iPhone 4 Defender Case
11. Angry Birds Red Bird Peruvian Beanie
12. Picnic Backpack
13. “The Big Lebowski”: Urban Achiever 8-Inch Figures
14. The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book
15. Tennis Star Gift Tin
16. Dallas Cowboys Floor Mats
17. “1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die”
18. “The Wire”: Bubbles Depot Reusable Travel Mug
19. “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” Wall Calendar
20. “Game of Thrones” Sword Letter Opener

Product strategists in the PC industry are gearing up for 2012 to be the year of the “ultrabook” — very thin, very light laptops, usually with solid-state drives (SSD), that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air — such as the Asus Zenbook and Lenovo U300s. We agree that ultrabooks’ lighter, thinner form will appeal to many consumers. Already, 21 percent of U.S. online consumers say they’re interested in owning one, according to a Forrester Research survey fielded in September. But we see the ultrabook as an evolution of the laptop rather than an entirely new form factor. So what is the next big thing in consumer computing?

The “next big thing” is likely to be many things — we anticipate accelerating form factor diversification beyond the desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones we have today, as we advance deeper into the Post-PC Era. Based on what we see in research and development labs, new products beginning to come to market and gaps in consumer computing experiences, we’ve identified these five form factors as the best candidates for what comes next:

• Wearables: Wearable devices, or “wearables” for short, are devices worn on or near the body that sense and relay information. Many wearables, like the heads-up display (HUD) contact lenses in development at the University of Washington, are years from marketability. But other wearables are already available as consumer products, for uses such as communication and health and fitness. An increasing number of wearables in the health-and-fitness space interact with Apple iOS devices, such as the Lark Technologies vibrating wristband that doubles as an alarm clock and a sleep sensor; and BodyMedia FIT Armbands, which have four sensors to track activity, sleep and calorie intake. WIMM Labs, a Foxconn-funded start-up in Los Altos, Calif., has designed multifunctional wearables, based on Google’s Android software, that it will license to other companies.
• Embedded devices: We define embedded devices as physical objects that incorporate computing processors and sensors, excluding those worn on the body, which we classify as wearables. Like wearables, embedded devices are diverse in form, ranging from devices such as Livescribe smartpens that fit into your pocket, to LG Thinq refrigerators that sit in your kitchen. Embedded devices may or may not have a display — Livescribe pens don’t; the LG Thinq appliances do. Today, embedded devices are widely used in industrial automation and automotives, and they have emerging consumer uses in home automation, entertainment and productivity.
• Surfaces: Surfaces are large interactive displays, which may incorporate multitouch, voice and gesture control, facial recognition, near field communication (NFC), quick response (QR) codes or other input/output mechanisms. Today, surfaces are found mostly in public places such as hotels (Microsoft Surface tables in Sheraton bars) and conferences and events (Obscura Digital’s custom multitouch video installations), as well as in education (interactive whiteboards) and news media (red state/blue state maps), but we see potential for additional uses, especially in retail and marketing. For example, retailers such as Victoria’s Secret have commissioned the design firm frog design to create interactive displays for their retail stores. In Seoul, South Korea, retailers use surfaces to extend their reach beyond their stores: Tesco Homeplus, the No. 2 grocery retailer in South Korea, built “virtual malls” in subway stations to reach more customers without building more stores. Commuters take pictures of QR codes under the groceries they want to buy, and the groceries are delivered to their homes.
• Flexible displays: Flexible displays are computing screens that can be rolled, folded or flexed. Flexible devices can take the form of personal devices, such as an e-reader, or larger surface displays, such as furniture or wallpaper. Flexible displays are likely the farthest from becoming commercialized products because of the lack of a defined use case or customer: Polymer Vision, a spinoff of Philips Electronics, promoted its flexible eBook Reader for years, but declared bankruptcy before bringing the device to market. HP has been developing printable Mylar displays that it imagines could be used for candy wrappers, armband computers for the military or living room wallpaper, but the displays are still several years from commercialization.
• Miniprojectors: Miniprojectors are small devices that project a larger image onto another surface or, in the case of holographic projection, into 3-D space. Miniprojectors can be combined with cameras that recognize gesture to become interactive, similar to the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360. Today, miniprojectors such as the Brookstone Pocket Projector are gaining in popularity as iPhone accessories. But they’re still niche products, as consumers must purchase them separately. Apple has already filed a patent to embed interactive projectors into its iPhones, iPads and Macs. Embedded miniprojectors would appeal primarily to information workers, but there could be broader consumer uses as well, such as impromptu photo slide shows or YouTube viewing in a group.

It’s easy to read about computing wallpaper, or contact lenses with embedded heads-up displays, and think that these form factors have no bearing on what product strategists are doing today. But product strategists who see what’s coming can anticipate disruption — or even innovate and become disruptors themselves. As you think about what’s coming in 2012 and beyond, know that none of these devices will operate in isolation. The most successful products will work with other products — for example, wearables that talk to smartphones and TVs; surfaces that are activated by the presence of your smartphone. We’re living in a multidevice, multiconnection world, and the best experiences will be those that work across devices and platforms. In that sense, the next phase of the Post-PC Era doesn’t look so different from today.

Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, serving consumer product strategy professionals. Follow her on Twitter at @srepps

Upstream component suppliers tell industry trade mag Digitimes that they estimate Barnes & Noble has shipped (not sold) about one million Nooks since the tablet’s mid-November debut.

That’s about 200,000 more than the company was expected to push into the channel before year’s end. A significant increase. The reason for it? Strong sales in North America over Thanksgiving, which kicked off the holiday shopping season.

That bodes well for the Nook Tablet, which Barnes & Noble said last week is already its fastest-selling Nook device to date. It’s also great news for the company’s growing Nook business. According to Barnes & Noble’s second-quarter earnings, the value of that business — which includes not just the devices themselves but their content and accessories as well — hit $220 million during the period, an 85 percent increase.

So says a survey commissioned by a publishers’ trade group: It finds that two-thirds of people who read magazines on tablets and e-readers think they’ll be spending more time with digital issues over the next year. Many of them — 46 percent — are consuming more magazines — both in print and digital form — than they did before they got their hands on an iPad.* And 63 percent of them want more digital stuff to read.

Overall, the survey has generally sunny news for the magazine business, though it’s fair to wonder if the Association of Magazine Media would release a survey that had glum news.

The report does offer some guidance for the industry: 89 percent of readers want publishers to adopt a uniform way of navigating magazines, and 69 percent like watching in-app videos that run less than minute.

The other point worth noting about the report is that it exists, period. The survey, conducted earlier this month, was completed by 1,009 people “pre-screened for their ownership of mobile devices and their use of magazine-branded apps.” Up until now, pollsters couldn’t have been able to find enough respondents to make that kind of poll possible, says Chris Kevorkian, the trade group’s executive vice president for digital: “We’ve been wanting to do this research for some time, but didn’t have the critical mass to query.”

*The survey isn’t explicitly about iPad magazine editions — in theory, it covers all tablet magazine apps, as well as magazines consumed on e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. But the majority of these things are being read on Apple’s device.

Time Warner’s publishing unit told its employees this afternoon that five magazines — Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and Real Simple — would be available on the Kindle Fire tomorrow.

The announcement comes after negotiations that dragged on for weeks and continued through Tuesday morning — a process that baffled most of Time Inc.’s peers, who signed on to the new device in time for its September unveiling.

Supposedly, the major stumbling block for Time Inc. was that Amazon has retained the ability to set the retail price for the magazines it sells, which means it could theoretically slash prices or give away the magazines for free. That scenario would be a major bummer for all the publishers who have been diligently trying to convince subscribers and newsstand buyers that they’ve been underpaying for their reading material.

But Amazon has told Time’s competitors, like Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith, that it doesn’t intend to beat down prices, and that assurance was apparently enough for them. Jeff Bewkes’ company apparently needed more convincing.

This never seemed to be an issue, by the way, with Barnes & Noble and its new Nook tablet; Time Inc. was a part of that gadget’s launch announcement.

Like the titles that Time Inc. sells via the iPad and other Android tablets, access to the Kindle Fire editions will come via bundled deals, where consumers pay a single price and get both paper and digital copies of their magazines.

Here’s the memo that consumer marketing head Steve Sachs sent out at the end of the day:

November 15, 2011
To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Steve Sachs
Re: Time Inc. Titles Now Available on Amazon’s Kindle Fire

I’m pleased to share the news that Time Inc. has just reached a deal with Amazon that will allow subscribers to our magazines to enjoy their subscriptions on the new Kindle Fire. Starting tomorrow, subscribers of FORTUNE, PEOPLE, Real Simple, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and TIME will be able to access digital editions of these magazines on the Kindle Fire at no additional cost. Other Time Inc. titles will follow shortly.

To date, hundreds of thousands of Time Inc. print subscribers have authenticated to receive their digital editions, with thousands more being added each week. Our agreement with Amazon continues to expand our All Access strategy, adding the Kindle Fire to the growing list of platforms where consumers can enjoy our content, including Apple’s iPad, the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet, the Android Marketplace and Next Issue’s store.

It’s important to note that Time Inc. is the only publisher designing all of its digital magazine apps specifically for tablets. Because we’re producing a rich consumer experience made for each device, our brands translate beautifully — and the Kindle Fire is no exception.

Adding the Amazon launch to our platforms has meant that IT and other dedicated teams have had to work quickly and nimbly. I want to offer a special thanks to all those who have been hard at work bringing our brands to life on tablets.

S.S.