Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
It adds bubbles on the player page for supported audiobooks showing which character and voice actor is speaking, along with “spoiler-free character cards” with more details on the performers. Audible’s also introducing an Interactive Stories feature for chatting with AI versions of book characters, starting with Dracula’s Renfield.
Mike Flanagan’s first Amazon series is a (mostly) excellent update of the classic Stephen King tale.
Its delivery vehicles were cited for over a dozen violations, including double parking, speeding in school zones, blocking bus and bike lanes, and more, according to a report from ALIGN. During the same five year period, Amazon vehicles also got 13,029 reports for idling too long.
[Alliance for a Greater New York]
To test the new AI-powered features on Ring, Google Nest, and Apple Home connected video doorbells, I put on the iconic Scream mask to see if any of them would warn me.
Only Google told me someone was wearing a mask; Ring somehow still knew it was me, and Apple just said “someone” was at the door. Read the full review.
Amazon plans to expand Prime Air to nearly 500 cities and towns this year, but some residents in one US city already covered by the drone delivery service say that it’s “been a disaster.” The drones are a privacy and safety concern, according to people living in Richardson, Texas, and sound like flying lawn mowers.
[The New York Times]
The September 2025 agreement said that Amazon would pay up to $1.5 billion over “deceptive” Prime signup practices. But after a court approved a joint motion, more people now qualify for refunds, there is now a maximum payment cap of $200 (up from $51), and Amazon will distribute refunds automatically, according to a press release.
[Federal Trade Commission]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on Tuesday that it was “unable to restore access to some customer data hosted in Persian Gulf data centers” following attacks by Iranian drone swarms in the spring that left facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain still “mostly offline,” according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
If you’ve been waiting to rewatch Project Hail Mary and the modern Doctor Who seasons like I have, this new bundle could make it a little less expensive even as prices for individual services keep climbing. It’s one of the biggest bundles on Prime Video, including all five streaming services for $29.99 per month.
Reuters quotes Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel saying that, “….we’ve spent time supporting the investigation and reviewing some of the surrounding circumstances, and we’ve decided to pause our operations with 21 Air, the operator of Flight 7598.”
So far, the NTSB reports that despite warnings about speed, “There was not a consistent verbal response to the comments about speed” from the plane’s pilot before it overran the end of the runway on September 6th, killing five people.
The new AI feature is supposed to help you track down stuff like your favorite character’s outfit, which could come in handy assuming it doesn’t just pull up random knockoffs. Amazon’s also making it easier to shop in the middle of your shows and movies with a new “Shop” tab in its X-Ray menu.
With Remote Play, which will be available “starting this month,” you can invite people to play multiplayer games with you “from wherever they are” instead of requiring everyone to be huddled around the same TV.
People who host games will need an Amazon Prime or Luna Premium subscription, but multiplayer participants will just need an Amazon account.
[Amazon Game Studios]
The two companies are also partnering to develop “high-performance optical connectivity solutions,” potentially amping up competition with Nvidia. As part of the deal, Qualcomm will use Amazon’s AI servers to speed up its chip design process.
Amazon has reportedly canceled Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man detective series that premiered on Prime Video and MGM Plus earlier this year, according to TheWrap. The report adds that Sony and Amazon “will continue collaborating” on more Marvel projects, and “have already identified the next chapter of the franchise.”
Fallout, your favorite post-apocalyptic RPG-turned-Amazon series, is now a Stern Pinball machine. You can play as Lucy MacLean, The Ghoul, or Maximus. There’s a functional vault door and a Pip-Boy displays important game information. There’s even a V.A.T.S. cannon that shoots the ball targets on an upper playfield.
The Amazon-owned robotaxi company was just approved to make passenger trips to and from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. Airports can be chaotic environments, and regulators want to be sure that robotaxis won’t add to the chaos. As the first robotaxi company approved for airport trips, Zoox will have its work cut out for it.
That’s on top of the 1 million Nvidia GPUs it was already planning to add, before demand “exceeded” expectations. The two companies doubled down on their partnership as Nvidia announced record revenue yet again, and Amazon says it’s planning to bring Nvidia’s Vera CPUs to AWS.
A new RoboCop show was recently greenlit for Amazon’s Prime Video, and Deadline reports that Stevens will play the lead role. A release date hasn’t been announced, but it’s apparently set to be an eight-episode series.
After Ryan Hurst was forced to step away from the leading role in Amazon’s God of War TV series due to an injury, Bautista will be taking over, Variety reports. Bautista was recently rumored to be in talks for the role.
For better or worse, Amazon Alexa and Google Home’s smart voice assistants have been imbued with new generative AI powers.
The promise is you can use natural language with your smart speaker to adjust your thermostat, lock the doors, and find out what your pets have been up to. The reality is smart home voice assistants are going through an identity crisis. I invited Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel onto his own podcast to compare notes on life with Alexa Plus versus Gemini for Home.
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404 Media put a tracker inside a shipment of rare books, which arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas:
Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process.
Last month, 404 Media reported that AI companies are buying used books in bulk to use them as AI training data.
