Codetown
Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas
Wired: "Happy Christmas. I got a coffee pot. You? If you got a book, it’s likely that it wasn’t made of paper. The succinct title of this Amazon press release tells the whole story: “On Christmas Day, for the First Time Ever, Customers Purchased More Kindle Books Than Physical Books.”
According to the release, “Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history.” Amazon still refuses to break out actual Kindle sales figures, but the following snippet shows you just how good a holiday season Amazon had: “On Amazon’s peak day, December 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide.” That’s a number that would bring most servers to their knees, let alone physical delivery fulfillment systems."
Interesting? It's interesting to me, too. Why? Well...it's all about software. Stay tuned...
Comment
Happy 10th year, JCertif!
Notes
Welcome to Codetown!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Looking for Jobs or Staff?
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
InfoQ Reading List
Yelp Achieves Zero-Downtime Upgrade of Over 1,000 Cassandra Nodes
Yelp has completed a large-scale upgrade of its Apache Cassandra infrastructure, spanning more than 1,000 nodes, without any service downtime, offering a blueprint for managing stateful systems at scale.
By Craig RisiPresentation: Deepfakes, Disinformation, and AI Content Are Taking Over the Internet
Shuman Ghosemajumder explains how generative AI has transformed from a creative curiosity into a high-scale tool for disinformation and fraud. He shares insights on "Disinformation Automation," the fallacy of CAPTCHA in an AI world, and why engineering leaders must adopt zero-trust "cyber fusion" strategies to defend against automated attacks that mimic human behavior with chilling accuracy.
By Shuman GhosemajumderArticle: Orchestrating Agentic and Multimodal AI Pipelines with Apache Camel
In this article, author Vignesh Durai discusses how agentic and multimodal AI systems can be engineered using Apache Camel and LangChain4j technologies. The key components in the solution include LLM-based reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and image classification.
By Vignesh DuraiHashiCorp Vault 2.0 Marks Shift to IBM Lifecycle with New Identity Federation
HashiCorp has released Vault 2.0, moving to the IBM versioning and support model following its acquisition. The update introduces Workload Identity Federation for secret syncing without static credentials, SCIM 2.0 provisioning, and performance gains in the storage engine. It also prioritises identity-based security and certificate automation while removing legacy architectural components.
By Mark SilvesterReact Navigation 8.0 Alpha with Native Bottom Tabs, Reworked TypeScript Inference and History
React Navigation has released version 8.0 in alpha, updating its routing library for React Native and web applications. Notable changes include native bottom tabs as the default, enhanced TypeScript inference, and deep linking enabled by default. The update prioritizes stability and includes a guide for migration from version 7.x.
By Daniel Curtis
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown