Thank the gaming gods for retail competition. You know the Xbox 360 Walmart is running today, right? Yeah, Amazon is going to match it.

Books, books, books! The American Booksellers Association, a trade group that represents small bookstores (not Barnes and Noble and the other big guys), has asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether or not Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target have “[devalued] the very concept of the book” with their ongoing price war. Well, they’re actually asking for an investigation into their selling practices. That is, because Amazon wants to outsell Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart wants to outsell Amazon, they both sell the latest book (think Stephen King, Dan Brown, etc.) for some really low price, like $10. When you consider that the average hardcover “should” cost something like $20-$30, just based on the wildly outdated economics of book-selling, then you understand why the ABA is so upset.

Wow. Amazon.com is now offering same day shipping – same day shipping — in seven major cities across the U.S. with more on the way in the near future. If you live in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Las Vegas, or Seattle then you’re already in one of the same day delivery zones.

Bezos may have apologized, but the stink of Amazon’s unprecedented act of cyberburglary is still strong enough that people aren’t likely to forget any time soon.

It’s a good thing, then, that Amazon has struck while the iron is still slightly hot by announcing the terms under which they will consider themselves justified in making your book an unbook.

The Kindle DX might be a good e-book, but the consensus among students at Princeton is that it is a very poor replacement for real books. Very poor, sir.

It’s not secret that students make a holy mess of their books, annotating, dog-earing, doodling in the margins — and none of that is easy (if it’s even possible) on the Kindle, or any other e-book at the moment. Sure, if all you need to do is read plain-text book, it’s handy. But what about diagrams? Full-color illustrations? Scratch-and-sniff patches?

The Kindle is, in its current form, “a poor excuse of an academic tool,” according to Aaron Horvath, Princeton class of 2010. (I think our Ivy League correspondent meant a poor excuse for an academic tool)

What’s the one area of technology that I’m still relatively keen on? That’s right: e-books, but that’s because I like the idea of having several books on my person at all times in a device that fits inside my trousers. (The latest: The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. Not an e-book, by the way, since I’m not made of money.) Devin, on the other hand, who also reads his share of books, is not as big a fan of the tech. We’re like The Odd Couple! Anyway, I bring this up because it looks like Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, is the first book on record that is selling better on the Amazon Kindle than its hardcover counterpart. (Blah, blah, the death of books…)

Amazon is making good after killing copies of 1984 for the Kindle. As you recall, Amazon had to recall the electronic version of the book for copyright reasons.

Purchasers will receive a copy of the book for the Kindle or $30 in credit for Amazon products or a check. So either you can get one book or cash for two or more books.

Giz has the full text of emails being sent to folks who bought the book:

Hello,

On July 23, 2009, Jeff Bezos, our Founder and CEO, made the following apology to our customers:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

Passwords suck. A good password is hard to remember, and a weak password is easy to guess. There are lots of attempts at finding ways to solve the problems of passwords, like one-time passwords, biometric authentication, and more. One of the most attractive solutions is two-factor authentication, which requires that you know something (a short passphrase, usually), and that you have something. The thing that you have is most often a little token generator: every 30 or 60 seconds a new set of digits is displayed on a screen. To successfully log in, you need to supply the passphrase that you know along with the digits displayed on the token. Big businesses have been using two-factor authentication for some time. Now it’s being made available for anyone with an Amazon Web Services account.

Canon rolled out a bunch of new cams yesterday and just like clockwork, Amazon has them up for preorder. Don’t believe they are on sale though. The “Our Price” is set right at the MSRP even though Amazon says they are on sale.

You gotta love automatic updates the bring new features to Blu-ray players. Panasonic is pushing out new firmware for its ‘09 Blu-ray lineup that adds Amazon on Demand to the already impressive extras of YouTube, Picasa, Bloomberg, and weather info. Oh, and that little portable Blu-ray player (BD15) also gains this ability along with the DMP-BD60, BD70V, and BD80. So once these players are graced with the update sometime today, users will have access to 45,000 SD titles and 1,000 HD titles. What’s there not to love?

Looks like Amazon just dropped the price of the Uncharted 160GB PS3 bundle, from $499 to $449. Of course, as per the rules and regulations of the Internet, we’re now required to speculate that this could maybe mean that Sony is looking to cut the price of the PS3 across the board.

There is probably a good chance that if you wanted the Palm Pre, you already snagged it at a Sprint store or Best Buy. Amazon now has the smartphone in case though.

Sharp eyes have spotted a certain “PlayStation 3 Konsole slim” on Amazon’s German Web site. The listing, which has no price attached, is still up as I type this (around 11:30 A.M. EDT).

Years from now, people will look back on the year 2009 as the year A) Apple lost the goodwill of a sizable chunk of the Internet audience; and B) when a high school kid sued Amazon because it remotely deleted an illegal copy of 1984. The kid is suing because he annotated the copy of the book, and now is without said notes. So of course, sue right?

Usually when I read a long article, I’ll say something like, “Free up 20 minutes so you can read the whole thing.” I’m not sure I’m going to say that today, having just finished an article in the New Yorker, which is usually good for a profile or two, about the Kindle. And it’s not because the article is down on the Kindle—I don’t own any Amazon stock, so I don’t care if Kindle sinks or swims—but because it doesn’t really say anything that you probably didn’t already know.

Look what just showed up on Amazon. That’s right, it’s the PSP Go, ready for pre-order for $248.99. That’s a deal, too—you save an entire dollar. That’s red-hot.