Amazon to launch drones, sorry "prime air"

Hundred years ago, it was pigeons. Now it's Amazon.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to reveal the company's latest delivery method: drones. In what is likely a cunning reminder of the e-tailer's upcoming Cyber Monday sales, these bots will apparently be capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (86 percent of orders are apparently less than that), with the aim of getting them to your house in under half an hour. The system is called Prime Air and the octo-copter drones, which wait, ready to deliver, at the end of conveyor belts, have a range of 10 miles. 

As Amazon puts it, "Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations" and Bezos himself added in the TV segment that it won't be before 2015 at the very earliest. While it sounds like they''ll take their time to get here (if they ever do), we've at least got a video of the drones in action :

What I wish to let Amazon know : Watch out Amazon, if your drones ever come closer to me, I am not going to wait any second to catapult them down, just saying.

The Bookseller

I kept looking at her until she disappeared from the scene and trailed off like a little train in the hills of Darjeeling. She had come to the store searching for a book written by an Indian writer. Though I did not boast of a big place with multiple helpers and a separate section for a café and restaurant at the back, I did not lack international best-sellers, national record-holding grossers and all-time classics. The Old Man And The Sea still lay

there on one of the selves. And my categorisation of genres, into fiction, non-fiction and geography, travel, sports and politics, among others, helped visitors locate any book they wanted to find, simply by navigating through the store.

I stole glances at her and saw her rummaging through the selves, picking up books by writers she liked. And every time she picked up a new book, there was this one ritual she did not fail to perform. She would read the cover page and turn it over, and then read the blurbs at the back of the book. She did all this, perhaps, to get the feel of any given book. She also went through a few pages inside; just to glance at the appreciatory comments the book in hand had received. It was still quite early for the bookstore to be full with visitors. It was only nine in the morning. A few foreigners could be seen ambling along the alleys in Thamel—camera in one hand and a travel map in the other. Most of them were probably sleeping at the local hotels that are scattered—in large numbers—in and around the tourist hub in the Capital. Almost all of them were possibly still struggling to get out of their alcoholic slumber from last night. And it was only in the afternoon, after the alcoholic stupor ended, that the foreigners teemed into my bookstore.