To submit your script, head to Studios.Amazon.com. Studios, launched in 2010, has received 7,000 scripts so far, and has 15 movie projects under development. The TV venture is new.

If your TV script is chosen for development, you’ll get $10,000. If it gets distributed on Amazon Instant Video, you get $55,000 plus five percent of royalties on toy and T-shirt sales. They also offer $33,000 for various writing assignments, and contests with prizes of $12,000.

To find the trade-in program, go to Amazon.com and search on the words ‘trade in.” You’ll see a “Visit our Trade-In Store” link at the top of your screen above the items listed for sale. Use the gift cards you earn on anything in the Amazon store, which these days pretty much covers everything.

Basically, the deal is you pay the shipping charge plus a storage fee of 45 to 60 cents per cubic foot per month, depending on the season. They list the stuff in appropriate sale categories. The shipping is by UPS. Amazon says they’ll provide discount labels once you know the size and weight you’re sending them.

The work involved is minimal. Put your stuff in a box, follow the instructions on Amazon’s website and print out the shipping label. The box will be picked up at your doorstep and Amazon will handle any complaints or communications with the buyer. The instructions have the kind of complexity that only a dozen executive meetings can put together, but it looks possible for humans to slog through it.

To learn more about the ins and outs, take a trip to Lifehacker.com. Search for the key phrase “How to sell your excess stuff for cash.”  Or click  here.

Actually, we knew that “Amazon Prime” members can borrow books instead of buying them, but we didn’t realize how big the selection had become. A “Prime” membership costs $79 a year and includes free two-day shipping on all Amazon purchases, along with free video streaming to laptops or other gadgets. And then there’s the lending library. It has 50,000 titles available right now, including 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers.

One of our nieces got a Kindle for Christmas and so we showed her how to borrow “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins. In her household, her dad is the Prime member, so he had to borrow the book first and then lend it to her. Only 49,999 titles to go.

In other “Prime” news, Amazon recently signed up more TV networks. Prime members can now get free shows from MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike, and other channels, in addition to the ones available before: PBS, FOX, CBS, ABC, Sony, Warner Brothers, etc. We figure that eventually you’ll be able to get every kind of TV show through Amazon Prime or Netflix or some similar service. The prices will be a steal, compared to cable TV. For example, Joy just discovered she can watch the popular British series “Downton Abbey” on Netflix.

• Any.DO is the web site for a free to-do list that includes voice recognition. Tell it to remember to get some milk and it stores that to your list. It also listens and captures any other task you need to do. You can collaborate with others in creating a list of tasks or objectives.  It’s available on Android tablets and phones and is coming “soon” to the iPhone, iPad and the web. (When we signed up, there were 18,485 people ahead of us on the waiting list.)
• “Skitch” lets you add comments and sketches to a photograph. (Also available on the iPad.)
• Price Check compares a store’s price with Amazon’s and has links to movie trailers and reviews. This will stop a lot of in-store purchases, and stores are already protesting. We’ve done this kind of check a lot, and it’s worth noting that Amazon does not always have the lowest price.

We have both tablets, so it’s easy to compare them. Joy finds she likes the small size and light weight of the Kindle Fire, just seven inches and 15 ounces. That’s nine ounces heavier than a regular Kindle, but seven ounces lighter than an iPad. The Fire is easy to throw into a purse or a bag. And it’s easy to hold in your hands for long stretches. In fact you can easily hold it in one hand, which is quickly tiring with the iPad.

The Fire’s “carousel” main page shows dozens of revolving images, representing your apps, books, videos and magazines. It’s very easy to navigate. You can use your finger to pin favorites to a shelf below the main screen image or move to other categories by tapping a link at the top of the screen. The links point to music, videos, apps, Web sites, documents, etc. If you’re already using Amazon’s Cloud Player for music, or getting free movies through a subscription to Amazon Prime, the Fire handles all that plus Netflix and games like “Angry Birds.”  We like it that you don’t have to type in a password every time you add an app.

The Fire connects to the Internet through a WiFi connection. Apple has a WiFi-only version of the iPad and another that adds a 3G cellular phone connection. You pay more for the cellular version upfront, plus a monthly fee. You may not mind the absence of 3G on the Fire, since much of your reading takes place offline. You save money by not having monthly charges.

Our favorite free news app is “Pulse.” This comes with stories from the Wall Street Journal, ESPN, and a dozen or so magazines and blogs. Turn on the Fire for a few seconds before you leave the house and those stories will quickly download. They will then be there when you’re offline on the bus or at the dentist’s office.

When the iPad first launched, a dozen how-to books immediately followed. We haven’t seen any yet for the Fire, which is an indicator of how easy it is to use. But of course there are books on how to use the iPad because it has more functions.

The bottom line: If you plan to use a tablet for business or creative tasks, get the iPad. If you like a larger screen, especially good for magazines, which tend to spill off the page if you enlarge them on the Fire, get the iPad. If you need a 10 to 12 hour battery life, get an iPad. In fact, the iPad is a charmer. Play around with one at an Apple store and see if you can get out the door without buying it. We couldn’t. But if we hadn’t already bought the iPad, the Fire would easily be enough for us – and the $300 savings is appealing.

A Prime membership costs $79 a year, but we obviously thought it was worth it. If you’re a Prime member, click “See all categories” from the store menu on your Kindle, and then click the category “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.” They’ve got some good ones. “The Hunger Games,” a favorite of our nephews, is near the top of the popularity list. Joy downloaded the number one choice: “Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson.”

You can also lend your own Kindle books to another Kindle owner for a two-week period, whether you’re a Prime member or not. Update:  Of the 50 books we own, only one is lendable.

Amazon’s new $199 “Kindle Fire” may surpass the phenomenal sales of Apple’s iPad.

In the first five days it has been available for pre-order, 250,000 were sold. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on opening day, but that included pre-orders and live sales. If Amazon continues like this, the Fire will probably burn past the iPad.

Should you get one? Unlike the iPad 2, the Fire doesn’t have a microphone or camera, but its simplified interface makes it easy to switch from movies to games to books to photos. And no matter how many downloads you have, Amazon will store them for free if they originally came from Amazon. They have 18 million items: movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books. Ten thousand movies can be downloaded for free if you pay $79 a year for a “prime” membership; which also gives you free two-day shipping on other Amazon orders. We took the deal because of the free shipping.

By the way: We recently saw a comparative price chart in the October 1, 2011 issue of the Economist magazine and Amazon’s prices were lower than Walmart and almost all other large retailers. The exceptions were Costco and Dollar General. Interesting stuff.

A new Kindle eReader that has ads sells for $114 and is handily outselling the $139 Kindle 3, which does not carry ads. Is it because people want to save the $25? Maybe not.

Quite a few people with the regular Kindle have said they wish they had bought the cheaper version, because they like the ads. Here are some examples:

• $10 for a $20 Amazon.com gift card.
• $6 for 6 Audible Books (normally $68).
• $1 for an album in the Amazon MP3 Store. Choose from more than a million albums.
• $10 for $30 worth of products in the Amazon Denim Shop or Amazon Swim Shop.

This reminds Bob of the short-lived newspaper “PM,” which was started in New York by Chicago department store owner Marshall Field III during Word War II. Field believed that because of the dire nature of the times, a newspaper should just have news, and not take up space with advertisements. Readers soon complained about the lack of ads, however, and the paper had to send reporters out to cover sales at local stores. Ads, it turns out, are content.