AOL has rolled several sell-side tools into a unified publisher platform, ONE by AOL: Publishers, and now plans to buy French yield management startup AlephD. “AlephD is one of the first deals you’ll hear about in 2016, but it certainly won’t be the last,” Tim Mahlman, president of publisher platforms at AOL, tells AdExchanger. “We had a lot of tools, but when we met this company it really changed the way we thought about how we should holistically look at a publisher.”

Seasoned media entrepreneur Steve Brill has some choice words for newspaper publishers. To Brill, publishers are “often been a bunch of rich kids who inherited a paper from mom and dad and continued a tradition of local monopolies,” as Poynter reports. “They never had to really compete, aren't big thinkers and were ‘paralyzed’ when real change hit the industry.”

Owners of Amazon’s popular smart home device Echo -- which goes by the name Alexa -- can now ask it to read them Kindle books. “You can use your voice to ask Alexa to begin reading by simply saying ‘Alexa, read book title,’” ZNet reports. “Or you can navigate in the Alexa companion app under the new Kindle Books section to see which of your titles she can read to you.”

Amazon this week is debuting Kindle instant book previews so third-party bloggers and the like can let their readers browse excerpts from books without leaving their properties. “If the strategy works, it’s also good for Amazon’s business,” GeekWire writes. “The embeds include a button giving readers the option to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.”