Hayley Tsukayama

A Q&A with Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN American Center.

She spoke about the group's letter, its advocacy on this issue and the role Nossel believes writers must play in discussions about surveillance. ” We feel writers are the canaries in the coal mine. If their rights are impinged upon, they feel it first and most acutely because they rely on free expression to do their jobs,” Nossel said.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella announced that up to 18,000 of his employees will get pink slips by 2015, as part of a massive round of layoffs. The cuts are the largest in the company's history, and they will hit an estimated 15 percent of its workforce.

The job cuts will affect both "professional and factory" workers. Nadella plans to cut 12,500 jobs from Microsoft's mobile phone unit, the Nokia Devices and Services business, which Microsoft acquired this past spring.

Apple has agreed to pay e-book customers $400 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its e-book pricing practices. But don't get too excited. The company is only going to pay under certain conditions.

The deal, struck with 33 state attorneys general, was prompted by the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple, which claimed the firm illegally colluded with book publishers to raise e-book prices.

If the court of appeals sends the case back to US District Court Judge Denise Cote , Apple has agreed to pay $50 million to settle its damages claim. And if the appeals court reverses the decision? "If we are vindicated by the appeals court, no settlement will be paid," the company said.

A Q&A with Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson.

The contract dispute between Amazon.com and Hachette Book Group has delayed the shipment of thousands of titles. The battle took another turn as Amazon reached out to Hachette authors with an offer to immediately begin offering the delayed books again and give its share of Hachette digital book sales to the authors for the duration of the dispute -- if the publisher would also forgo its share of the revenue.

What do authors think? Robinson isn't buying it, saying the offer is merely a tactic to bully the publisher into conceding to unfavorable terms. When presented with that argument, Amazon said that writers against the deal are "conflating the long-term structure of the industry with a short-term proposal designed to take authors...out of the line of fire."

“The Amazon letter didn't really take us out of the middle; it asked us to take sides against our publishers,” Robinson said. "It also seems to assume that what we really want is a short-term windfall, which is what we get if Amazon asked Hachette to give up revenues from e-books. But we want a healthy publishing ecosystem, a system of commerce in which we’re not trying to kill each other or drive each other out of business.” She added that the government should step in whenever a single company has too much power, it creates “a situation in which legal intervention would make sense.”

New results released by the Centers for Disease Control reveal that two of every five American households have ditched their landlines for cellphones -- and there are interesting differences between the health of households that still have landlines and those that are wireless-only.

The data are part of a preliminary study from the National Health Interview Survey, a part of the CDC's statistics department that regularly conducts tens of thousands of phone and in-person interviews to get a snapshot of Americans' health.

In 2003, the agency decided to also look at how many households have landlines to better tailor its survey. Since then, it's become the most prominent government agency collecting the data. Overall, 39.1 percent of adults are in wireless-only households; that number goes up to 47.1 percent when the figure also includes children.

You may expect that young adults are primarily driving the trend toward households that only use cellphones -- something that has certainly been true in the past. But 2014 marked the first time that, by a slim majority, adults 35 and older make up the largest portion of households that rely solely on cellphones. In line with other studies looking at the demographics of technology use, Hispanic adults are also far more likely to be living in households that only had wireless phones.

The clash between Amazon.com and publishing giant Hachette has taken a new turn, as hundreds of authors asked readers to write e-mails to Amazon's chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos to protest the web retailer's tough tactics.

One letter, spearheaded by author Douglas Preston and signed by nearly 400 authors -- including Stephen King, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert A. Caro and novelist ames Patterson -- takes Amazon to task specifically for not accepting pre-orders on Hachette authors' books, not discounting the prices of many Hachette books and slowing the delivery of many Hachette titles to consumers' doorsteps.

"We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner. Nor is it the right way to treat your friends," the authors wrote.

Google, already the world's leading search engine, wants a place in the rest of your life, too. At Google's annual developers conference, company executives demonstrated how Google's Android operating system can work in cars, on televisions and on wearable devices -- ensuring that consumers are never more than few moments away from Google.

Wearable technology was a main focus of the event, and Google gave a few more details about its software for smartwatches, called Android Wear. The firm also said that it is working on a project called "Google Fit" that will aggregate data from fitness apps and wearable devices to help users keep track of health data. Samsung and LG announced at the conference that they are both releasing new wearable devices -- the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch -- that consumers can pre-order from Google's Play store.

Using these devices, you'll be able to do things such as call a Lyft car straight from your wrist simply by saying, "Okay, Google. Call me a car." Google has a plan for your own car, too. Its new AndroidAuto system connects your smartphone to your car dashboard, includes a button in the steering wheel that connects you to Google Maps and allows you to dictate text messages.

Sprint announced that it's going to let consumers take a 30-day test run with its network as part of a push to advertise a string of network tune-ups it has made across the country.

The carrier, the nation's third-largest, has spent years overhauling its network. The company said that it was launching 4G LTE networks in 28 new cities, offering high-definition voice service across the country and planning to launch its high-speed "Sprint Spark" service in three new cities. The company also said that it will begin offering consumers the option to call and send texts via Wi-Fi networks in the coming weeks.

Given all of those changes, the company said, the firm is going to let users try out its network for 30 days, starting June 27. Those who take advantage of the offer can opt to cancel their service within 30 days for a full service and device refund, the firm stated in a press release.

The offer is available to new customers opening lines with Sprint, or to existing customers who wish to add a line to their accounts. The promotion may help Sprint, which has struggled to retain customers during its network makeover, lure some who have switched to other competitors such as Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile back to the flock.

Company spokeswoman Adrienne Norton confirmed that the trial period option is a promotion -- as in, it won't last forever -- but that Sprint has not yet set an end date.

T-Mobile threw another one of its flashy "Uncarrier" events again, announcing that it will not charge its customers for data they use when listening to streaming music from some of the industry's top services. The news came just hours after Amazon.com announced that its first smartphone, the Fire phone, would offer free integration with Amazon's own Prime Music service and Prime Video.

Both add more fuel to a trend we've seen coming for a while: The future of entertainment is in the bundle.

With its latest announcement, T-Mobile has gone even further, by making music essentially a part of its data plan. Under the new program, any data charges customers would have picked up by streaming Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Slacker, Samsung's Milk streaming services are excused. T-Mobile will also extend the same deal to the upcoming Beatport app. The company said that, between those eight services, it believes it has covered over 80 percent of the streaming music market.

[Commentary] Forget point-and-shoot. This is point-and-shop. Amazon.com announced that it's officially getting into the smartphone market, releasing the Fire Phone -- a clear play to get more users for its $99 per year Amazon Prime membership.

The phone, which will be offered exclusively through AT&T, has a button on the side that will immediately recognize products that users scan, listen to or watch, and then send them directly to Amazon.com to buy it.

“Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand," Amazon chief executive Jeffrey Bezos said in a company press release.

But there's one big problem for Amazon: It's not a great time to get into the smartphone market right now, particularly in the United States where the interest in new smartphones is flat. Nearly everyone who might want a smartphone in this country probably has one, and once customers get into a certain smartphone maker's orbit, they tend to stay there.

There's a reason that Apple and Samsung command nearly 50 percent of the world's smartphone market between them -- and nearly all of the profits -- leaving all other companies to pick at the scraps. "It's a nasty business," said Carl Howe, an analyst for the Yankee Group. "At best they'll break even, and you need a lot of sales of other stuff at single-digit margins."