Round up #192: Best Books of the Year, Amazon Sidewalk
The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.
Amazon’s Q3 financials disappointed…but it’s okay now
When Amazon announced its Q3 results on October 24.
the stock dropped enough that Jeff Bezos reportedly was no longer the world’s richest person…but that only lasted about a day. 🙂
According to
the stock is up about 2.47% over the past 30 days.
Amazon’s brag sheet…er,
has more details. Sales were up (naturally), but yes, income was down. However, they’ve introduced several initiatives which have a lot of potential in the future. Certainly, I’m not worried about them…although I’m also not dependent on them for income.
Amazon announces the best books of 2019
Amazon has announced their
The Best Books of 2019 (at AmazonSmile: benefit a non-profit of your choice by shopping*)
These are the features and categories:
Featured in Best Books of 2019
- Top 100: Print Books
- Top 100: Kindle Books: the two lists are very similar at the top…I think they used to be more different when more books were released without Kindle editions. The number one book? The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (at AmazonSmile*), the Booker Prize winning sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale
- Celebrity Picks (including: Stephen King; Sally Fields; Admiral McRaven; Kobe Bryant; Louise Penny; John Waters; Dav Pilkey; and more)
- Editors’ Holiday Gift Picks
Best of the Year by Category
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Leadership
- Children’s Books
- Cookbooks, Food & Wine
- History
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
- Nonfiction
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Teens & Young Adult
Disney+ has launched
As I had written I thought would be the case, Disney and Amazon worked out their differences enough for Disney+ to be available on the Fire TV family. I’ve written my first impressions on my other blog, The Measured Circle:
Disney+ on Fire TV: 1st impressions
Amazon Sidewalk
In this
from September 27, Amazo announced a new communications protocol they call Sidewalk. This is one of those things which may make a big difference in the future. It’s the use of the 900 MHz band to enable smart devices to have a network that goes outside the home, but not as far as a SmartPhone would do. I don’t think there’s been enough notice of this.
It will mean that you can have your Ring camera further away from the door (we love ours…we’ve seen two deer come right up on the stoop in the middle of the night, and we are not in a wild area), which is great. They are promoting it for a device they’ll release called Fetch, which will be able to geolocate your dog (or other pet). That’s great: it can let you know when your dog leaves your yard.
In the future, though, they clearly intend the networks to intermesh…your neighbor’s Sidewalk (although probably not your neighbor) will know when your dog is nearby.
That means, hypothetically, that the police could eventually get data about where people are or were. Yes, they can do that now with a SmartPhone, so maybe it doesn’t matter, but it does seem like there will be another way to track things. That can certainly be a good thing, but I’ve just been surprised not to see more comments about it.
Amazon future>>engineer
This one seems like a great program, like Amazon giving back!
It’s a way for people from “underserved and underrepresented communities” to get help in studying computer science. One important part of it is that you can apply for $10,000 a year 4-year college scholarships (so, $40,000 altogether) right now. It goes down to K-8, but I wanted to call attention to the ability to apply at
Certainly, this could help Amazon in the very long run…not only producing more engineers, but making people more comfortable with robotics and AI. Still, a lot of people could benefit who never ended up working for Amazon (well, for the college scholarship, there is a paid summer internship at Amazon after their freshman year in college). Deadline to apply is January 17, 2020, 3:00 PM CT.
What do you think? Worried about Amazon Sidewalk? What do you think was the best book of the year? Watching Disney+? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.
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All aboard The Measured Circle’s Geek Time Trip at The History Project!
* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. 
Shop ’til you help!
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other organizations, begin your Amazon shopping from a link on their sites: Amazon.com (Smile.Amazon.com)
I Love My Kindle 
November 13, 2019 at 11:56 pm |
Goodreads is also accepting votes for favorite books. They’re into the second round now. I haven’t read a lot of “new” books due to the price, but of the ones I have read, my favorite fiction book is “Where the Forest Meets the Stars,” by Glendy Vanderah. It is currently available through Kindle Unlimited. It’s a book that is very hard to categorize. It skirts contemporay fiction, fantasy, psychological mystery, and magical realism.
My favorite memoir has been “Save me the Plums,” by Ruth Reichl. I bought it with a discount for using “great on Kindle” points.