Why buy the song when you can get the album for free? (Well, almost for free.)

Lady Gaga's entire "Born this Way" album is selling for $0.99 on Amazon.com today.

Demand for the album caused problems for Amazon, the Associated Press reported. Amazon experienced a high volume of traffic that caused delays for those downloading the album.

The new album includes the title track, "Born this Way," as well as top hit "Judas."

Perhaps the demand was due in part to this incentive: People who buy any album from Amazon through the end of the year can get 20 GB of cloud drive storage free for a year.

Read the fine print though; you will have to pay for storage *after* the first year's service.

For the unfamiliar, cloud computing is when a user's files are saved to and stored on a computer network, rather than a user's personal computer (or smartphone, or whatever device is popular today). It allows the data to be accessed by any device connected to the cloud computing service.

Cloud computing doesn't have to be just for storing music on the go. Here's how some high school students are using the technology to advance their studies.

Amazon, Google and soon, Apple, will have competing cloud computing services.

For other tech moves by Amazon, see today's Computers column by Paul Gilster.

A federal judge has blocked North Carolina's attempt to force online retailer Amazon.com to turn over the names of its customers to state tax officials.

The U.S. District judge in Seattle, where Amazon.com's headquarters is based, said Monday that turning over customer names to government authorities violates a key First Amendment tenet.

"The First Amendment protects a buyer from having the expressive content of her purchase of books, music, and audiovisual materials disclosed to the government," Judge Marsha Pechman wrote. "The fear of government tracking and censoring one's reading, listening, and viewing choices chills the exercise of First Amendment rights."

The ruling is a victory for a half-dozen anonymous North Carolina residents who bought products from Amazon.com and asked the court in Seattle to protect their identities. The residents, four of whom live in the Triangle, said they bought materials about sex, alcoholism and other controversial subjects.

Amazon.com is fighting an effort by North Carolina tax officials to collect customer data, including personal information and details on everything residents have purchased at the online retailer since 2003.

In a complaint filed Monday in federal court in Seattle, Amazon wrote that the request from the N.C. Department of Revenue would violate the First Amendment rights of its customers. State officials are seeking the additional information as part of an audit of Amazon's compliance with state sales and use tax.

The spat comes as North Carolina is trying to increase tax revenue and bolster its ailing budget. North Carolina has threatened contempt proceedings if Amazon doesn’t turn over the names and addresses of each customer in the state who bought more than 50 million products from Amazon during the past seven years, according to the complaint.

The N&O is now on Kindle.  Kindle is Amazon.com's popular gizmo that lets you read books and other content - like newspapers - on a book-sized electronic tablet.  The charge is $6.99 a month. You can also get one day's paper delivered on the Kindle for 50 cents. Here's how to find out more.

This is the third way that people can get our content digitally. There is, of course, the web where you are reading this right now. Then there's our e-edition, which is free to seven-day subscribers of the print newspaper, but costs $5 monthly for non-subscribers.

I should probably say four ways, because, increasingly, people are reading us on their Blackberrys and iPhones. This has been the so-called mobile version of newsobserver.com, although I think the Kindle now is just as mobile.

There are different experiences with each medium.  The print newspaper can be spread out  on the breakfast table. I can read Sports while my wife reads Triangle & Co., tear stuff out and take it anywhere. I can also see all the ads and the news at the same time. 

The web site - newsobserver.com - has unique advantages. For one thing, it's updated throughout the day, so it has the latest news. We also put photo galleries on the web, as well as video and audio.  The web has our blogs, like this one.  And you can email stories easily, and add your own comments. We also have ads online that frequently are different than the ones in the paper.

The e-edition is essentially a digital version of the morning paper, so you can look at it on your laptop and see exactly where the stories, photos and ads were published in print.  For folks who want to see what stories went on Page One and which stories went on 3B, that's useful. 

Cell phones are great for getting the news quickly, but the screens are tiny and passing the phone back and forth across the breakfast table has its obvious limitations. And no comics.

We'll see where the Kindle and other products like it fall on the spectrum.  The device has been popular among book readers, because it looks and feels like a book, only it can hold a lot of books.  Whether people will want to read newspapers on it remains to be seen. But we have only seen Kindle-like devices in their infancy.  In five years, these devices will certainly be turbocharged, just as today's computers are about a light-year more advanced than the first one I bought in the late 1980s. 

So our first step was doing all the work -  technically speaking  - to feed our stories to Amazon.com so it can deliver those stories to Kindle subscribers.  That's a baby step. In a year, we might be sending photo galleries, video and audio to Kindle readers. We may be able to send updates of stories. We may create book-like collections of major stories just for Kindle users. Who knows.  

I'm positive that as more and more companies compete in the Kindle space, the collective genius of these companies will figure out ways to present the content we gather every day in new, visually compelling and interactive ways.