First it was in a 7-Eleven in the Pacific North-West, then a Rite Aid store in New York City. Yes, the Amazon delivery lockers are coming. The concept is pretty interesting: you can have your Amazon order delivered to an Amazon locker at your local convenience store or other convenient nearby location that has an Amazon locker installed.

Google Offers, Google’s competitor to Groupon, rolled out in Portland in June, hitting the New York and San Francisco areas last month. This month Google Offers is available in Denver, Seattle, Boston, Austin, and Washington, D.C.., with Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, and Philadelphia to follow shortly, to name just a few. Not to be outdone, Amazon has rolled out Amazon Local, in many of the same cities.

Amazon has decided to tackle states that are adopting Internet sales taxes head on, by underwriting and spearheading a referendum to have the newest Internet sales tax, that in California, repealed.

California is the newest state to pass a law taxing sales at companies like Amazon when those sales are generated by a local (in this case California-based) affiliate or associate. And, not unexpectedly, about five minutes after California Governor Jerry Brown signed the legislation, California becames the newest state to have their affiliates dumped by Amazon. As we’ve pondered before, is it arrogance or simple ignorance that is leading these state legislatures to pass laws that, instead of bringing in new taxes, are depriving their state economic engines of taxable spending fuel? Instead of bringing more income into the state, by chasing away the affiliate programs, they are depriving their own residents of income – income which would come back to the local economy.

Mark Twains autobiography was published for the first time this past November, in keeping with his wishes that the Mark Twain auto biography not be published until 100 years after his death (Mark Twain’s date of death was April 21, 1910; Mark Twain’s date of birth was November 30, 1835). In the autobiography Mark Twain clearly indicates that he is speaking freely (and often shockingly) about friends, acquaintances, enemies, and other contemporaries, because he has fixed it so that the Mark Twain autobiography cannot be published during their lifetime or, indeed, the lifetime of their children. And so it is that the Mark Twain autobio is only just now coming to light, and well worth the wait: Mark Twains life was very interesting. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, it only makes sense that of all the Mark Twain biographies one might read, at the top of the list should be Mark Twains biography of himself. But how to read it, when the font is so tiny that it almost necessitates a magnifying glass, and weighs in at hefty 743 pages of tiny print? Here’s how.

Many of you received an email from Amazon this week which invited you to enter the “Win an Kindle 3G from Amazon.com” contest in honor of Amazon Prime, and, of course, and as you should, you were suspicious and are wondering whether it’s a scam. in fact, the “Win a Free Kindle 3G Sweepstakes” is legitimate! No purchase necessary, and here is how to enter (even if you didn’t get that email). You’ll need a Facebook account, as it involves the Amazon Facebook page, and that’s where the catch comes in.

Amazon has announced a new, cheaper, reduced-price Amazon Kindle. The new ad-supported Kindle with Special Offers, as it is known, is identical in hardware to the wifi Kindle – in fact it is a wi-fi Kindle, only it displays advertising along the bottom of the home screen, along with “sponsored screensavers” (which users get to help pick using Amazon’s ‘Hot or Not’ style Admash. In exchange for letting Amazon have your eyeballs in this distinctly Google-esque manner, you get your wireless Kindle with ads for $25.00 less – $114.00 instead of $139.00. Worth it?

As Amazon takes on more and more of a competitive stance against the likes of Google and Microsoft, Amazon has added to its cloud offerings an email sending service which effectively makes Amazon an email service provider. The Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) joins other Amazon cloud offerings, including storage, video and other file hosting, and Amazon’s flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service which allows you to create virtual servers on the fly (and in the cloud).

Amazon has just announced their “Elastic Beanstalk”, which they describe as “an even easier way for developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud.” “AWS” stands for Amazon Web Services. The “Elastic”, first coined for Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud” (Amazon EC2), refers to the ability to increase or decrease your viritual server capacity on the fly. The service, which is essentially an interface for all of the underlying Amazon AWS offerings, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Notification Service, and Elastic Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling, is available at no additional charge.

Ever wish you could share your Kindle books with your friends and family, Kindle to Kindle, or Kindle to Kindle reader app? The latest Kindle news is that now you can! With Amazon’s new Kindle Lending service, you can share books on Kindle which you have purchased with your friends and family, even if they don’t have a Kindle book reader of their own! They can read the books for Kindle that you loan them using the Kindle for Android application, the Kindle for Blackberry app, the Kindle for iPad and iPhone apps, or the Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC software, all of which are free! If they have an email address, you can loan them your lendable Kindle books free!

Phillip Ray Greaves II, the man who wrote and self-published on Amazon a book called The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct, was arrested this week on a warrant for obscenity charges issued by Polk County, Florida. Although Greaves was arrested in his Pueblo, Colorado home, the charges stem from his selling his book to a Polk County sheriff, and mailing the book from Colorado to the sheriff in Florida. Amazon removed the Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure from the site last month.

The Google Book Store or, perhaps more accurately, the Google eBook Store, was officially launched today. The store, stocked with at least 3 million books, allows you to download Google books from the Google eBookstore to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phone or device, the Sony Reader, and even the Barnes and Noble Nook, as well as to read Google eBooks with your browser.

Have Amazon and Wikipedia struck a deal? It sure seems that way, with the roll-out of Amazon’s new “Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia pages” being displayed right on Amazon. While both Amazon and Wikipedia are being unusually tight-lipped about it (read as: nobody is admitting to anything), it appears that there is either a formal or informal deal between Wikipedia and Amazon, or else Wikipedia is foolish enough to be losing out on a huge source of potential revenue.

Amid a scandalized outcry, Amazon this week stopped selling a book entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct, although they continue to sell an apologist treatise on the same subject. The former, self-published by Phillip Greaves, and the latter, written by David Riegel and published through the interestingly-named Safehaven Press, are at the center of the current tension between freedom of speech, protection of children, and Amazon’s duty, if any, in both.

We all receive them. Gifts that we really appreciate, but that we’ll never use. Did Great Aunt Martha send you a Snuggie? Uncle George sent you a Flowbee? What if you could exchange them before they ever arrive at your doorstep? What if you had a built in “unwanted gift detection and gift swapping system” that would deploy before the gift left the warehouse? That is exactly what Amazon’s new patented “System and method for converting gifts” does for you.