Amazon has confirmed it doesn’t make money on the e-reader devices it sells. Both the traditional Kindle handset and Kindle Fire tablets fail to add revenue for the e-book giant, barely breaking even.

Jeff Bezos, Chief Executive of Amazon, told the BBC,

“We sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break-even on the hardware. We want to make money when people use our devices, not when people buy our devices. What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle. But they don’t stop buying paper books. Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.”

So where do Amazon’s mammoth profits come from? Predominantly via the sales of e-books, films and music. In what seems a strange tack when compared to the aggressive prices and revenue drives of the likes of Apple (which runs iTunes just above break even and makes profit from device sales), Amazon seems almost benign, more like a lending library than a global company.

The latest range of e-reader devices from Amazon, including the Paperwhite device, have been designed to work alongside a book lending scheme – the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

With Christmas on the way, Amazon is hoping users will consider upgrading or investing in a new device during the busiest consumer time of the year. The new tablets and e-readers are being released in October, giving fans plenty of time to use their favorite sell for cash website to sell tablets and offload old devices to fund an upgrade.

UK gadget company, Money4Machines, said,

“Kindle e-readers are always popular. They’re durable, simple and always desirable, even dated models. We buy first generation Kindles right through to the latest devices, and their popularity looks set to grow with the development of schemes like Amazon’s £49.00 annual subscription lending library.”

The whole handbags-at-dawn bicker between Apple and Samsung has been a globally followed case. South Korea says they’re both at fault, the UK has put its fingers in its ears and chosen not to comment until October, and the US says Samsung is the devil and must pay Apple a Doctor Evil sanctioned amount of money for infringement of copyright on various devices and their evil lair.

But what does it mean for regular folks looking to iPad trade in, old Kindle updates and new devices?

Pros

• Encourages innovation
• Discourages sneaky copying (who’d have thought that was an issue at such a high level!)

Cons

• A big one for Samsung, whose stock dropped by around £8.2 million after the verdict.
• Patents may become silly (e.g. the court ruling Apple’s patent on rounded edges was valid)
• Could create a minefield for designers and put off a) engineers actually wanting to be design engineers, and b) delay phones and shrink the market

The bottom line is that the biggest pro of the verdict has to be that it seriously encourages innovation. Apple have enjoyed a comfortable niche at the top of the market and clearly developed some of the most pioneering software and design staples of the age. The problem has clearly been mobile phone companies looking to capitalise on the success of each other with similar handsets that can be designed and manufactured quickly.

We’re pretty excited to see what’s going to be on offer from our buddies over at Samsung and Apple in the future, but for now we’re happy for you to sell consoles, London themed laptops, tablets, old Kindles and whatever other goodies are lurking in the cupboard!

We’re fairly interested in the petty to-ing and fro-ing of Apple and Samsung. It’s a bit like those placards kids are sometimes made to wear by their disappointed parents saying things like “I lied to my parents about what happened to the Apple pie”, but in this case Apple may have to run an expensive campaign of apologies in main UK newspapers and on their UK website – “We lied about breaking that vase and blamed Samsung” or something similar!

The old iPad is a real favourite here in the Money4Machines office. We buy UK iPads for great rates every day, so we’re very interested in splendid little bites of Apple news (will it ever get tired making puns about biting the Apple?) and our buddies over at Apple HQ didn’t disappoint with a juicy bit of news about what Steve Jobs really thought of the 7” iPad (the iPad Mini)

It’s seems old Stevie wasn’t as averse to the project as he publically stated, one of his close colleagues even going so far as to put finger to key and send this email,

“”Having used a Samsung Galaxy, I tend to agree with many of the comments below (except actually moving off the iPad). I believe there will be a 7″ market and we should do one. I expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive the last time. I found email, books, Facebook and video very compelling on a 7”. Web browsing is definitely the weakest point, but still usable.”

An Apple executive team have submitted the email as part of evidence presented at the Apple v. Samsung court case.

We got our delicious nibble of the Apple rumour tree from our mates over at Techradar.com – thanks for the info kids! According to Techradar, we could see a 7”-8” iPad by the end of the year (so get thinking about our iPad trade in rates in time for an upgrade!)

Here in Money4Machines HQ, we’re big fans of stuff like apps that tell us when we need to visit the dentist, where our car keys might be and what exactly Office Cat’s particular meows are demanding.

Contrary to popular belief, we all live lives away from the office doing things like watching telly, gardening, cycling, planning hypothetic trips around the world and cleaning up after Office Cat’s house parties.

In the spirit of Phil Inkley, here are some non-tech-related nuggets of life advice to help us all make it through the gauntlet of daily tasks a little more easily!

1. Newspaper murders weeds

Our SEO girl has a nice big yard with some delightful plots picked out for bedding areas. She tried this tip a few weeks ago and, in place of triffids and strangling vines, she has a nice blank yard canvas upon which to create a garden masterpiece!

Simply clear away as much of the weedy mess as you can and lay sheets of newspaper over the area. Then put a layer of soil on top and plant your lupins, sweetpeas or whatever else you fancy growing.  Weeds are sneaky little critters and will find any hole in plastic sheeting, but drop a bit of newspaper on them and they’re stuffed!

“Ten more minutes on this crossword and I’m going to show those weeds the meaning of pain!”

2. Blackboard erasers for fogged-up windscreens

Driving to work in winter is basically awful for most people. It’s cold, it’s dull, it’s early and we’d all rather be dreaming of iPad trade-ins or kittens or sell for cash UK rates or whatever it is people who don’t work in our office dream of!

This is such a simple and easy tip – just keep a blackboard eraser in your glove box instead of a cloth (and all the old batteries, burger wrappers and petrol receipts!)

3. Cornmeal is death to ants

Ants are an annoying hazard of the summer months, and getting rid of them is about as much fun as a lobotomy. If you’ve got pets and kids to think about, laying a load of ant poison might not seem like the brightest idea!

Leaving a few piles of cornmeal close to whatever cracks in the wall they’re disappearing into makes an attractive food source for the little beasts. They’ll carry heaps of the stuff back to the nest to feed the rest of the colony. But joke’s on you, ants! They can’t digest cornmeal and it’ll kill them. It may take a week or so for it to work, but it’ll keep your home toxin-free!

Winter is coming. Oh wait, make that Wimbledon is coming!

Apparently there’s some kind of bandwagon going around the UK at the moment. It’s something to do with the weather, but that may just mean it’s been delayed by flooding! It’s taken a few days to get here but we’re finally ready to jump on and talk about… the rain!

When you sell your iPad through our lovely little iPad trade in service, you don’t always remember to wipe your data. (It’s okay, we have a really, REALLY thorough data erase software for your old iPads, smartphones and whatever else you send our way!) And there are always a slew of weather apps on there.

1.Weather Bug (Apple, Android, Blackberry, Maemo)

Offered as a free add-supported app or the “Elite” add-free option. They used to offer a pretty good SMS weather alert option for those of us still in the 2G era, but it’s being discontinued some time over the next couple of months (which is no good for our marketing girl who carries a spare old Motorola around just in case her iPhone battery dies!)

The app can be a bit fiddly to use, but it’s convenient and accurate. Weather warnings are the soggy bread and butter of Weather Bug, so they’re a superb option for the UK at the moment! Weather Bug’s selling point is definitely thoroughness and a mine of comprehensive weather information.

2. Met Office Weather (Apple, Android)

Our favourite because it’s simple. We’re not an office of meteorologists, so something that says “75% chance of rain” is about as technical as we need to get. The app is free and runs superb measurement tools like what temperature the day “feels like” It takes into account things like wind speed and wind direction and tells you how that’ll impact on your sense of temperature throughout the day.

3. Weather HD (Apple)

You might want to sell laptops and whatever else you’ve got lying around to buy this cute little weather buddy! To quote one our manliest tech guys, “Man, that’s beautiful!”  And it really is. The app is £0.69, and we reckon free apps do the same job just as well. But if you want more than just bog standard weather prediction, Weather HD tells you in visual poetry! Check out this review of Weather HD for some real screen shots.