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Another prestigious school is embracing Amazon's Kindle e-reader.

Princeton University has announced that it will start printing Kindle-edition textbooks this fall, according to a story in The Christian Science Monitor.

Princeton follows Yale, Oxford, and UC Berkeley in creating textbooks for the Kindle. In the United States, there are about 2,500 four-year universities, so Amazon still has a long way to go.

But the Kindle should appeal to university students better than other demographics.

I wrote this week that I was putting off buying a Kindle until I learn whether I can read digital books on the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale July 11. If the handheld enables me to read e-books well enough, I'll probably pass on the Kindle. The reason is simple: the iPhone gives me much more for my money.

Students, on the other hand, do so much reading that they may be thankful for a device that can help save their backs. Instead of schlepping 10 pounds of textbooks, the Kindle can hold about 200 titles and it weighs only 10 ounces.

Instead of having to thumb through pages, students can find text instantly with Kindle's search feature. It also allows a user to highlight text and make notes.

It's been a long time since I was in school, but I remember those long lines to buy books in September and January. Contrast that with Kindle's wireless service and the ability to download books off the Web from almost anyplace.

Back then, I would have been glad to buy a Kindle.

Tip: At Amazon, Kindles are advertised now for $359, but it might pay to check out eBay. Ina Fried, my colleague here at CNET News.com, paid $329 at the auction site this week and used Microsoft's Live Search cashback offer to get an additional 20 percent off. Total cost: $264.

Update 12:45 p.m.: I've learned that there's a strong bond between Princeton and Amazon. The company's founder, Jeff Bezos, is an alumnus of the university, class of 1986. I obtained the information from co-worker and former Tiger Caroline McCarthy (2006).

I wanted a Kindle. I was ready to buy a Kindle. The iPhone spoiled everything.

Amazon's Kindle sells for $365.

(Credit: Amazon)

I'm an avid reader of digital books and for months I had my eye on the Kindle, the digital reader from Amazon, with its high-contrast screen and PC-less book downloads. Then Apple announced that the iPhone 3G goes on sale July 11.

I'm now in second-guess hell.

I know Apple has said nothing about offering an e-reading application for the new iPhone. But what happens if Steve Jobs later surprises us or some developer turns the iPhone into a whiz-bang electronic reader? I'll tell you what happens, my Kindle ends up on eBay.

I can imagine a slick iTunes bookstore, stocked full of titles that are easy to buy and download--sort of like Amazon.com. Even if Apple decides against getting into book sales, the upgraded iPhone will be open to developers. I'm betting one has already written an e-reader application.

There's a huge opportunity here for some enterprising developer. The person could write a reader application for the iPhone and then sign licensing deals with top publishers. The developer could sell digital books out of their own Web store. The pitch to the publishers would be: "I have the best way for you to get on the iPhone."

Of course, if Apple, which possesses complete control over the iPhone application development program, is planning something similar down the line, then a third-party e-reader application might not pass. Last January, Jobs voiced skepticism about e-readers, telling The New York Times that people "don't read anymore."

This to some is a good indication that he's interested.

The iPhone offers more value than the Kindle.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Regardless, all of this highlights the main problem with the Kindle: it's too much of a specialty device to appeal to a mass market audience. People want more value than the Kindle offers.

Sure, Amazon's the iPhone when it comes to providing a better reading experience. The Kindle features a 6-inch screen and E Ink technology, which is easier on the eyes than backlit displays. But the iPhone has all it needs to become a great digital-book reader: a 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display and 480-by-320 resolution.

I've read close to 20 books on my Palm Pilot TX and its 3.8-inch screen is plenty big enough.

Certainly, the Kindle's advantages as an e-reader aren't enough to trump the host of iPhone features: a phone on a new faster network, camera, video player, it holds photos, contacts, you can play games and there's the apps we don't know about yet. With the Kindle I get Web browsing and e-mail.

When you size up bang for the buck, it's all iPhone. The 16GB iPhone 3G costs $299. Of course that doesn't include network charges. The Kindle sells for $365 and that includes free wireless.

Brett Arends at The Wall Street Journal argues that if you read a lot, the Kindle can help you save money because e-books are cheaper than the paper kind. But he acknowledges that you have to buy 61 books before the device pays for itself.

Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein predicts that global e-book sales at Amazon could reach $2.5 billion by 2012. If he's right, I'm thinking many of those sales won't be for the Kindle.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh and Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.

But when things break, it isn't always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?

CloudStatus works with Amazon Web Services now. Hyperic plans to support additional cloud service providers later this year.

Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It's launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.

The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Flexible Payment Service.

The company says that CloudStatus will report on service availability, latency, and data throughput.

Hyperic says it plans to add the capability to monitor other cloud computing services later this summer.

Click here to see more stories on cloud computing.

These availability charts from Keynote Systems show Amazon's U.K. site, top, dropping largely off the Net, then gradually recovering. The U.S. site, the lower chart, showed more intermittent problems.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Pages on Amazon's U.S. and U.K. Web sites sporadically showed an error message like this Monday, as well one saying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was intermittently available, though, so it does not appear to be out of the woods yet.

Update 10:40 a.m. PDT: The "We're sorry!" error page that showed up Friday also is appearing on some other pages. The site is working for me, but not for an East Coast colleague.

Update 10:47 a.m. PDT: Amazon.co.uk now works for me again, though with sporadic errors on product pages.

Update 10:59 a.m. PDT: The company still hasn't responded to my requests for comment, but Amazon acknowledged problems on a forum for those who sell goods at the site: "We are currently experiencing an issue that is causing site performance issues. Our engineers are actively engaged on resolving this issue, and we will continue to provide updates until service has been restored," the company said.

Update 11:07 a.m. PDT: I'm getting intermittent errors again at the main pages, and some product pages of Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. So it's clear that as with Friday, recovery is a fits-and-starts affair, even an hour after the problem began.

Update 11:58 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com and most of Amazon.co.uk are working for me. One curiosity: when the site was really struggling, it was rare to even get the "Sorry!" error page.

Outages are bad, but as eBay learned nearly a decade ago, multiple outages are worse. Over its history so far, though, Amazon generally has a reputation for reliability.

Update 12:28 p.m. PDT: Amazon has posted an "issue resolved" update to its seller community forum on Monday--but it's not about Monday's problem. Instead, it's just got old news, saying that on Friday, Amazon resolved the problem it was having on Friday. Still no word from the company about the second glitch.

Update 1:20 p.m. PDT: Keynote Systems, which monitors the availability of Web sites browsed from PCs and mobile devices, confirmed that Monday's outage hit the U.S. and U.K. sites.

The U.S. outage was a double whammy, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. The first problem showed from 10:03 a.m. to 10:23 a.m. PDT, with site availability dropping to about 30 percent. A second, less severe problem occurred from 10:56 a.m. to 11:09 a.m. PDT, he said.

The U.K. glitch was a single, longer-lasting outage that began at 10:06 a.m. and dropped the site to about 30 percent availability. The site gradually recovered over a period of about two hours to 50 percent, 70 percent, and now 98 percent.

"It stills look like some type of user error or configuration glitch," he said. "The data just doesn't demonstrate any kind of network-level attack."

Update 1:40 p.m. PDT: Amazon confirmed the problem, though it didn't share much detail: "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites on Monday morning. However, we are working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Update 2:50 p.m. PDT: A reader and I just got more timeouts on the U.S. site, with not even an error message showing. Things still aren't totally up to snuff, apparently.

Also, I added some nicer graphs from Keynote.

Update 4:36 p.m. PDT with outside comment about possible causes of the Amazon.com outage.

Amazon posted an apology placeholder page for broken links during a two-hour outage.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

A two-hour Amazon.com outage is over. Now on to the post-mortem: what triggered the problem?

Amazon declared itself clear of the problem this afternoon. "The Amazon retail site was down for approximately two hours earlier today beginning around 10:25 a.m. The site (is) back up," the company said in statement.

But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

"Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems. We work to minimize any disruption and to get the site back as quickly as possible," the company said, declining to comment further.

Human error?
The most likely culprit was simple human error, in the estimation of Shawn White, director of operations for Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site availability.

"Some engineer might have made a particular change, not knowing it could cause a trickle-down effect" that eventually brought down the site.

For example, he said, somebody in charge of maintenance might have been directing Internet traffic to a particular group of servers, but selected the wrong group.

But at Amazon? "What I find still so surprising is it happened in the middle of the day. Typically you do that in off-peak hours," White said. "They rank on the top with performance and availability, consistently, time and time again."

Network attack?
Another possible explanation is an attack such as the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that struck Amazon and other high-profile sites in 2000. White thinks it unlikely, though, that a crushing load of network traffic brought Amazon down.

"These guys are experts at dealing with flash floods of users," including those that routinely arrive during peak shopping days. "Usually, when you see a site going under because of traffic issues or a denial-of-service attack, you see a gradual slowdown in performance and drop in availability. Here we saw at 10:16 a.m. it completely dropped off 100 percent."

Soups Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff of network protection and management company Narus, hasn't yet found any attack evidence.

"It doesn't seem to be the result of a network-initiated attack, at least from my preliminary analysis from our probes," Ranjan said.

Human error may not sound as gripping a tale as a network attack, but there's plenty of drama for the people responsible. And it's the career-limiting variety of drama, said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, who hazarded a guess that Amazon's problem involved its front-end Web servers.

The security group of WebSense, a Web site and communications protection company, also saw no evidence Amazon's problem was security related.

CNET staff writer Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

Update 3:22 p.m. Amazon has declared the outage over. For details, check our follow-up posting. Updated 12:43 p.m. PDT with further details, including partial site recovery.

Keynote Systems showed Amazon.com's availability drop from nearly 100 percent down to 10 percent or lower at 10:21 a.m. PDT Friday.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many U.S. visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday.

The site went offline completely by 10:21 a.m. PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12:45 p.m., the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken.

"At noon PDT, we started to see the site getting better," said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. "We are seeing about 70 percent availability."

One-off outages are no fun, but sustained problems can be a serious problem. eBay suffered outages in 1999 that outraged users and sent the stock down, and even a backup system didn't ward off more problems in 2002.

And for major commerce sites, the problem can have ripple effects. Both Amazon and eBay provide a commercial foundation used by many partners and entrepreneurs.

Expensive problems
Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don't include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

Of course, money lost can be money gained for a competitor. A Sony PlayStation 3 promotion with the Metal Gear Solid 4 game went on sale at 10 a.m. PDT, according to some CNET News.com readers. Another reader went to BuyDig.com to buy a birthday present.

"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to use the site.

Amazon posted an apology placeholder page for broken links.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Representatives of the company haven't responded to requests for comment.

Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working, including those in China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Amazon Web Services unaffected
It appears Amazon Web Services such as the S3 storage and EC2 computing services still are functioning, at least for some customers, though the AWS page at Amazon.com isn't working.

"S3 and EC2 continue to function for us as normal," said Don MacAskill, chief executive of photo-sharing site Smugmug. Mashery.com CEO Oren Michels, who uses AWS for several functions and who has several customers who use AWS, reported no problems Friday.

Customers who need to get to their AWS pages can follow a direct link, Amazon said.

The security group WebSense concluded the Amazon problems are "not security related" as far as it's aware. Arbor Networks Chief Technology Officer Jose Nazario was more cautious, though: "I've got nothing on it as to why or what happened. I'm not sure if it's an attack or service outage via failures on their end or what."

What's your theory on the cause of the Amazon.com outage?

News.com staff writers Greg Sandoval, Rafe Needleman, and Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

In an interview with Walt Mossberg at D6, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, "We are working on a new version of video on demand, a for pay streaming service we will release in the next couple of weeks. The streaming service will start instantly and it's a la carte, for pay."

This will be in addition to Amazon's download-to-Tivo service.

Developing...

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

Amazon has invested an undisclosed amount in Animoto, a site that enables people to easily create videos from their photos and music.

(Credit: Animoto)

Animoto.com, which launched in August, has more than 160,000 registered users, with 7.5 percent of them paying a $30 annual fee to be able to create longer videos. The company also has a Facebook application, which launched in March and has more than 750,000 users.

The Amazon funding doesn't exactly come as a surprise given the links the companies have. Animoto uses Amazon's Web Services and was a featured presenter at an Amazon event in September advertising its services.

And last month, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos talked about Animoto during a presentation at Y Combinator's Startup School at Stanford University.

Animoto says it will use the money to hire people in its New York City and San Francisco offices, establish a video creation platform, develop new products and continue innovating in the area of "cinematic artificial intelligence."

"We also plan to upgrade our fridge from PBR to Coors Light," the company said on its blog. "Life is good."

Yes, it is.