Come on, you know they totally did this. These cosplayers have the right idea. (Fashionably Geek)

Attempts to get a Zombieland television show off the ground have been happening since before the movie was even conceived, but it’s taken the mercantile nature of growing online streaming video market to give it its best chance yet. Even so, when Amazon.com’s pilot of the show does air, it won’t get turned into a series unless it pulls enough eyeballs, so you should probably get used to the new actors playing the characters.

I asked Zombie Bill Murray whether he’d be appearing, but he said nobody would ever believe him.

The Girl on Fire has defeated the Boy Wizard in a battle for the ages! Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy has now outsold all seven of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books to become Amazon.com’s best-selling book. And the odds weren’t even in their favor! 

Gone are the sweet, sweet days of tax-free online shopping. At least, they might be soon, if an upcoming bill in Congress that would make sales tax standard online passes. Now might be a good time to check out those bookmarked shopping carts.

Just a month ago we were talking about the shady things Amazon.com does to use its 60% of the ebook market muscle to make smaller publishers lower prices against their better judgement. We were also talking about how the US Department of Justice had announced that it would be investigating six of Amazon’s competitors in ebook publishing (Apple, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, the Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins) for colluding to set prices in the ebook market. Well, it only took about a month for the DoJ to announce that they had indeed found, in their opinion, enough evidence to prove that the six were trying to fix prices. And it took less than a day for Amazon.com to, seemingly coincidentally, announce plans to push down pricing on its ebooks, from $15 to $10 in some cases.

Things aren’t going so well for graphic novel and manga publishing. In March of 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund issued an advisory about transporting comics and graphic novels across international borders. Two months later a comics fan named Tom Neeley was detained at the Canadian border, and his copy of the comic anthology Black Eye confiscated by customs. CBR reported then that Canadian censorship seemed particularly aimed at Japanese comics and gay-themed material.

Last week Comics Alliance reported that criminal charges of child pornography possession had been dropped against U.S. citizen Ryan Matheson, who, in 2010, “entered Ottawa on vacation with a laptop that contained comics images that Matheson described as ‘anime illustrations from art books’ and ‘drawings of fictional anime and manga characters.’”

Amazon is sitting pretty at the top of the pecking order of the eReader market, in part because its spot atop the online retail market gives it the freedom to set Kindle prices low. Lower, in fact, than most other eReader formats; in a world where the Kindle takes 60% of the market in ebooks and is getting perilously synonymous with an electronic device dedicated to reading print publications. This means that when the company decides it doesn’t like that its affiliates want to charge more for their books, they can simply refuse to make some perfectly compatible ebooks unavailable on the platform, with devastating results to that publisher.

“This should be a matter of concern and a cautionary tale for the smaller presses whose licenses will come up for renewal,” said Andy Ross, an agent and a former bookseller. “They are being offered a Hobson’s choice of accepting Amazon’s terms, which are unsustainable, or losing the ability to sell Kindle editions of their books, the format that constitutes about 60 percent of all e-books.”

Amazon.com, the go-to online website for discounted products and lazy shoppers (myself included) is about to test out an actual physical store location to sell its products. If successful, you could soon have an Amazon store in your neighborhood. 

The burgeoning field of ebooks is rife with controversies over exclusivity, ownership, piracy, and big corporations against meek and powerless independent authors. And so it’ll be interesting to see how Amazon.com’s new $6 million initiative to pay authors royalties on how many “borrows” their books get from the Kindle’s free lending library pays out. All the authors have to promise is that their work will be available digitally only on the Kindle, for people who own Kindles.

Here’s how Amazon says it’s going to work:

Under $100 is pretty good for an armored jacket, but we can’t help but feel this is a situation where you get what you pay for.

And though it severely strains our credibility, according to Amazon’s algorithms, people who bought this jacket also bought…