Amazon.com has, as expected, revealed the details of its new payment service in a lengthy, meandering blog post. Don't bother reading it: The geeks in Seattle take forever to get to the very sharp point. The short version? Jeff Bezos is planning to plunge a long knife right into the heart of eBay CEO Meg Whitman's most important growth business, PayPal. Here's the secret of how the eBay-owned payments service mints money — and how Amazon.com's founder is crafting a boldly savage plan to gut it.

The first time I met Jeff Bezos, he was trying to sell me something. It was April 1999, and he'd just bought Accept.com, a person-to-person payments business. Bezos was vague about his plans, but my understanding was that he was planning to do to the money-transfer business what he'd already done to booksellers. Of course, it never happened. Amazon buried the business in trying to integrate it. Accept.com CEO Danny Shader, pictured here in a more enthusiastic moment, departed for more entrepreneurial pastures, and PayPal rose from nowhere to take over the online-payments business. Now, I read that Amazon is trying to make up for eight years of lost time by launching its own PayPal competitor, and take on Google Checkout as well. Good luck with that, Jeff.

Amazon.com shares are up 27 percent to $87.79, and analysts have set new stock=price targets ranging from $99 to $105. Guess they're not worried about Harry Potter and the Deathly Refunds. [Tech Trader Daily]

Thank goodness Ollie Kottke is a newborn and not a Harry Potter-obsessed preteen. If he were, then his father Jason Kottke would have had a real problem on his hands when UPS lied to him about its delivery of Kottke's copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on Saturday. As it was, he was just inconvenienced. As was I. Here's my story — and to my mind, proof that Kottke's missing copy was not an isolated incident, and instead, a big problem for UPS and Amazon.com.

Since CNBC interviewed me about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in the famous series, leaking onto the internets, there have been further developments. Scholastic, Potter's U.S. publisher, is threatening legal action against DeepDiscount.com, an e-commerce website which only started selling books five months ago. While it appears DeepDiscount.com did break Scholastic's embargo, it's not clear that the copies — photographs of pages, really — leaked onto file-sharing networks actually came from the online retailer. Not that any of this will hurt sales, as I told CNBC, of course. Most people don't dress their kids up in wizard costumes and stay up until midnight to download torrents. And the few dorky enough to do that placed their "Potter" pre-orders on Amazon.com months ago. (Video from CNBC)

Sure, Falls Church, Va. is the "Harry-est" town in America, with the highest pre-orders on Amazon for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows per capita. But we're more impressed that Vienna, Va., hometown of the Valleywag, made it to the #4 spot. [Amazon.com]

Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, determined to offer FREE Super-Saver Shipping to the entire solar system, this week released photos and video of "Goddard," the first product of Blue Origin. The effort represents Bezos's attempt to offer reasonably priced space travel to the sub-billionaire income bracket. The project's Latin motto, "Gradatim Ferociter," translates approximately to "step fiercely," which sounds like something our gay dance instructor used to call out. (Feel free to correct that translation, Latin nerds, as if we could stop you.) Anyway, if you cared, the test flight was a success. Expect flights of conquering Bezos-pods to loom over your home town by Christmas 2015.

More detritus cleanup as we venture into the new year: Click to enlarge the above image into a (very large) perspective on pre-holiday book inventory prep in one of Amazon.com's UK warehouses. Bear in mind this is likely one of Amazon's more modest operations. Any similarity to the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark is purely coincidental.

SCOTT KIDDER — Buying holiday gifts on Amazon.com? For anywhere from $2.99 to $5.99, depending on the item, you can have your item gift wrapped. How convenient!

From this compilation of Amazon.com reviews of classic literature:

Now that Amazon.com is selling groceries in addition to container ships full of Harry Potter books, sib site Consumerist points out one of their best-reviewed selections: milk. The fine moo juice has accumulated 300+ reviews so far; you can also examine multiple views of the milk, as if examining the jug of milk from a foot away, perhaps 14 inches away, and perhaps 10 inches away. Really gives you perspective on the milk's many different visual facets. Some customers complain that the milk does not repel manta rays, does not make servers run faster, nor cures cancer. For more sincere and also much more idiotic reviews, check out the Amazon grocery's top-selling item: cinnamon toothpicks.

After noting the hullabaloo regarding Amazon.com's defiance in continuing to sell cockfighting magazines, we asked for your help in locating even more objectionable periodicals that Amazon enthusiastically pimps for purchase. You responded with gusto, and we present a gallery of favorites after the jump.

As usual, fascist freedom-hating killjoys at the Humane Society are out to ruin everyone's good time by threatening to sue Amazon.com unless the online retailer ceases selling subscriptions to Gamecock and Feathered Warrior magazines. While mailing cockfighting magazines might technically violate the interstate commerce restrictions of the Animal Welfare Act, Amazon is taking a brave stand for free speech and violent poultry by defying the Humane Society and continuing to accept orders for the mags. Both cockfighting titles are also practically historical artifacts — Feathered Warrior's been published since 1903. And Gamecock has enjoyed an explosion in popularity due to the "bad" publicity, climbing to #105 in Amazon's rankings of over 17,000 available titles. Charming as these magazines are, we're willing to bet Amazon stocks other magazines which are even more objectionable. Send in your contenders (with Amazon links) to tips@gawker.com.

The inscrutable logic of Amazon.com's targeted-marketing emails, as manifested in a friend's inbox yesterday:

As a coda to her controversial column "Nicole Kidman deserves to be happy," antediluvian tattler Liz Smith notes that her own recent appearance on "CBS Sunday Morning" sent her book Dishing (a "little work about celebrity and food"; and here we'd thought Gael Greene had cornered the market on geriatric culinary gossip) soaring toward the rafters of the Amazon rankings. In a subtle dig at the inability of The Post to move merchandise, Liz puts this down to the power of television. We're just impressed that the seven aged viewers of "CBS Sunday Morning" were able to switch from their TV screens to their internet connections and successfully order the book, which, hopefully, is available in large-print format.

Salon smartypants Rebecca Traister takes a look at the Amazon.com reviews for Times columnist Maureen Dowd and finds the worst possible scenario: a big bucket of misogynistic scariness. Writes John F. Ross of St. Louis, MO (Amherst Class of '79):