40Tech

I don’t think I’ve ever downloaded a free Kindle book from Amazon, but I’ve seen some of my Facebook friends mention that they regularly read free Kindle books. I recently received a tip through my contact form, suggesting a site that lists over 33,000 free Kindle books.

Finally.

Amazon Whispersync for Voice Syncs Audible Books With Kindle Books: “Whispersync for Voice does more than just sync audiobooks between devices, however, it also syncs the location of Kindle Books. Users can now sync their location between the Audible and Kindle version of select books easily. The service works automatically, or users can engage Whispersync manually to sync to the furthest location in either version of the book.”

(Via Gottabe Mobile)

If you share your Kindle account with someone, it could be a headache to read a book that the other person has already read. The problem? If you use Amazon’s Whispersync technology, your Kindle will think that the furthest read location is the end of the book (or wherever the previous reader left off). I previously wrote about the convoluted process you could use to reset the furthest read location on your Kindle. Fortunately, Amazon has now come up with a much easier way to reset the furthest read location.

I ran into a problem recently. I was making a new purchase on Amazon.com, and wanted to zero out a Visa gift card that I had received for Christmas. The problem is that Amazon only allows you to use one credit card per purchase, so there was no way to use the Visa gift card, which only covered part of the price, and then use my main credit card for the balance. There might not be a direct way to use two or more credit cards for an Amazon purchase, but there is a workaround.

What a week for the cloud. On April 19, Sony took down the PlayStation Network in the face of hacker attacks that compromised the network. Two days later, large portions of Amazon Web Services crashed and burned, due to technical glitches. Amazon has since recovered, but the PlayStation Network is still offline. Much has been reported about the effect of the Amazon outage on major sites like Quora, reddit, and Foursquare. But many “ordinary” bloggers use Amazon services as well. How did it affect them? We spoke to a blogger whose sites were taken offline by the outage, and learned a few things.