Sarah Lacy's long-awaited book on Web 2.0 is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The title: Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. It's due for release on May 15, which means we'll probably see copies circulating in late April. Future reviewers, let us save you the work of coming up with a kicker: Yes, the title practically begs for Lacy to announce a followup oeuvre to prove she, too, is more than just lucky.

I'm as ready as anyone to declare Sony the victor in the epic high-definition disc battle. Its Blu-ray, now supported by Warner Bros., looks set to best Toshiba's HD-DVD. In Hollywood, where they still care about the industrial process of shipping plastic discs by the millions to retail stores, this matters. In the Valley, we've long since moved on. Sony executives still dream of formats, hardware, and an empire of lock-in. To them, "software" means the creative content screened in theaters, dropped into CD players, or played on a videogame console. That's why they're doomed to lose the real war.

Kindle is Amazon's new digital reading device that costs $400. But author Daniel Oran has thankfully found a (very) slightly more interesting use for the thing: readers can download the almost-final draft of his novel, Believe, for 99 cents. It's like a novel beta-test! He hopes his friends, at least, will download. Perhaps coincidentally, the novel is "a story about ripples: how the actions of one person can affect so many others." Like if one person buys a book and tells a friend and tells another friend who happens to know a producer on Oprah...

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs's keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron's spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller's IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has "few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S." What does that mean?

Warner Music has struck a deal to bring its entire back catalog, free of copying restrictions, to the Amazon MP3 store. (New releases from artists like Josh Groban are not included.) This brings the total number of songs available on Amazon to 2.9 million, and strikes another blow at Steve Jobs's quest to remove digital rights management code, or DRM, from iTunes music. So far, only EMI and a number of independent labels allow Apple to sell music in the DRM-free MP3 format. The theory is that the other music labels are willing to allow Amazon.com to sell DRM-free music in an attempt to break Apple's stranglehold on the digital distribution of music. Of course, they're hardly hurting Jobs, since Apple's iPods can play Amazon-sold MP3 files. Did we mention that the music industry is run by self-defeating idiots?

It seems that every year is Amazon.com's "best year ever." That's no surprise given that the number of people shopping online is growing every year and a huge number of them shop at the 'zon. Every year, Amazon releases a list of holiday shopping minutiae, including popular items and details of a few interesting shipments. Here are the highlights:

Amazon.com is moving its headquarters out of an aging hospital and into a shiny new corporate campus north of downtown developed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. One of the main draws? "Great access to public transportation," company spokeswoman Patty Smith tells the Seattle Times. Ah yes, that would be the South Lake Union trolley — known locally by the acronym "SLUT." Just think: 6,000-some Amazon workers riding the Slut. All in a day's work. (Photo by Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Why the frenzy of end-of-year redesigns at Google? Last week we noticed that Google was launching a new sidebar with Video and Products results. This evening, Google changed the "Products" button on its home page and search result pages to "Shopping."

Those not initiated in the mysteries of databases, i.e. most of us, may think that Amazon.com's new SimpleDB service is competition for established databases from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. It's not. Nor is it, in the lofty language of Web-computing evangelists, a "cloud-based" alternative to large Web databases. But it's probably a perfect match for your stupid Web 2.0 startup, which makes it a genius move by Amazon.

Maybe Jeff Bezos does have a hit on its hands. TechCrunch notes that the sold-out Amazon Kindle is selling for up to $1,500 on eBay. Didn't these people skim Robert Scoble's review of the e-book reader? Or Walt Mossberg's slam? Both say the thing's a piece of crap. For the same $1,500 you can buy a well-equipped MacBook, or almost four iPhones. When the thing first came out, I considered buying one, but didn't think it was worth $400. I guess I was wrong. At these prices, it's practically the new Nintendo Wii.

Those beautiful days of sipping tea along the Garonne whilst ordering books that will arrive in a week's time, free of charge, are over. The high court in Versailles has forbidden Amazon.com to offer free shipping after the French Bookseller's Union threw a fit of Gallic rage, claiming the Web retailer was offering an "illegal discount on books." Woe to free markets. Amazon has 10 days to end gratis shipping before the French court imposes a daily $1,462 fine. Jeff Bezos is also stuck giving a not-so-secret Santa of $146,158 to the booksellers.

Amazon.com has taken a minority stake in Bill Me Later, according to reports. Why? Likely, it has something to do with the 217 percent year-over-year increase in traffic to BillMeLater.com, where users sign up for new accounts. As part of the deal, Amazon will join Wal-Mart and Overstock.com in adding Bill Me Later as an online payment option.

Amazon.com and Pepsi have teamed up for a year-long free music promotion, very similar to one Apple and Pepsi had several years ago. The promotion, scheduled for a Super Bowl launch, will have consumers collecting five Pepsi bottle caps for one free music track from Amazon. In short, Amazon is making a major play against iTunes. The Super Bowl is the highest-profile advertising venue in the world, and Amazon will get tons of attention from the Pepsi promotion. For free music, plenty of people will take advantage of the promo — but will they stick around to buy music when it's finished?

Amazon has officially launched Askville, its version of Yahoo's wildly successful pageview generator Yahoo Answers. On Yahoo's site, the questions get answered through the generosity of its users. Askville will bribe users with Quest Gold, redeemable for Amazon.com gift cards (for a limited time). Google Answers, which was shuttered a year ago this week, had questioners pay to get their questions answered. Time will tell if this scheme will be able to compete or if it will fail like it did the first time. That's right: This is Askville Version 2.0. It launched last year to underwhelming response. Next time, Jeff Bezos should ask if anyone wants him to do anything besides sell books.

Ahh, that feels good right there. I don't think we'll be talking about this week next week. The Facebook pile-on continued. Amazon's Kindle reader suffered a surprise media backlash. I'd hoped for another bank-employee-in-tutu photo to liven things up. Instead we got Gerstmanngate. At least we still have jobs — oh wait, Valleywag party girl Megan "Leggy" McCarthy is heading to Wired. I think I'll go curl up in the tub with my INVISIBLE PUPPY. (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

Walt Mossberg, surprisingly slow out of the gate, has finally deigned to review Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. He was not kind, calling it "mediocre" and "marred by annoying flaws." He also says that Amazon "nailed the electronic-book shopping experience," which is no surprise given the success of Amazon.com, "but it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices." Harsh words from a top reviewer who can make or break a device. Here's our question: what took him so long?

NBC Universal, in its ongoing effort to throw Steve Jobs into a jealous rage, is wooing every other feller with a video service in sight. In its man-harem: Jeff Bezos, with Amazon Unbox, and Jason Kilar, CEO of its joint venture with News Corp. Hulu. Add to the list Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. NBC has wooed Hastings into a syndication deal. As Apple used to do on iTunes, Netflix will offer new episodes of Heroes the day after they air, alongside a library of prior 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, and The Office shows. Looks like someone can finally stop whining about the gaping hole left by the iTunes pullout.

I know I'm not the only one thinking Amazon.com's e-book reader Kindle sounds more like kindling, something that should be burned, rather than something that ignites ideas and revolutions — a problem that a good naming myth, well told, will not easily overcome. Fortunately for Bezos, Charlie Rose can't help but interrupt his guests and provide the answers to his own questions. In an interview, the CEO fumbled through the origin of the e-book reader's name. But why is Jeff Bezos completely failing to tell the true, compelling, and literary origins of the Kindle name?

A week after launching, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal remain the bestsellers for Amazon.com's e-reader, Kindle, but Time magazine has dramatically fallen to 12th place and continues to fall. Why? The display technology, eInk, is better than traditional displays at approximating the experience of text on a page, but the high-contrast, monochromatic screen is lousy at displaying images. The Kindle version of Time omits the images because of this, and Time magazine's appeal is as much in pictures as in words.

The collective sieve known as Valleywag deliberately filtered out the me-too launch, earlier this month, of Amazon.com's Clickriver, a targeted advertising system that places what are essentially sponsored search results into Amazon's product listings. Say you're shopping for an MP3 player ... "Well look there, maybe I should buy a Zune." Predictable, and Amazon has long carried ads in its listings, and Clickriver just appeared to be a self-service interface for buying these ads online. But then we happened to stumble across a listing for the Amazon online display advertising team.