MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
February 12 – February 19, 2009 Edition
Amazon Unveils
Slimmer, Faster
Amazon Kindle 2
SEATTLE/Authorlink News/02/09/09–Amazon.com, Inc. today introduced its new reading device, Amazon Kindle 2, to a crowd of publishing dignitaries in New York’s Morgan library. The new reading device offers wireless delivery of content in a new slim design with longer battery life, faster page turns, over seven times more storage, sharper images, and a new read-to-me feature.
Kindle 2 features a high-resolution 6-inch electronic paper display that books and reads like real paper, which lets users read for hours without the eyestrain caused by reading on a backlit display. More than 230,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including 103 of 110 current New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases, which typically sell for $9.99. Top U.S. and international magazines and newspapers plus more than 1,200 different blogs are accessible on the device, which still sells at a pricey $359. The unit is available at http://amazon.com/kindle2 and will ship February 24.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos told the crowd: “Kindle 2 is everything customers tell us they love about the original Kindle, only thinner, faster, crisper, with longer battery life, and capable of holding hundreds more books. If you want, Kindle 2 will even read to you – something new we added that a book could never do. While we’re excited about Kindle 2, we know that great hardware is useless without vast selection. That’s why the Kindle Store offers customers over 230,000 books.”
At just over a third of an inch thin (0.36 inches) and weighing just over 10 ounces, the new Kindle 2 is pencil thin and lighter than a typical paperback. New buttons make it easy to turn the page from any holding
position. The new 5-way controller on Kindle 2 allows for more precise note-taking and highlighting both up and down and side to side in lines of text. The new controller also makes it easy to quickly jump between articles and sections of newspapers. Kindle 2 comes with a redesigned power charger that is more portable than the previous Kindle charger.
Kindle 2 offers the experimental read-to-me feature “Text-to-Speech” that converts words on a page to spoken word so customers have the option to read or listen. Customers can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and their spot is automatically saved. Pages turn automatically while the content is being read so customers can listen hands-free. Customers can choose to be read to by male or female voices and can choose the speed to suit their listening preference. Using the read-to-me feature, anything you can read on Kindle, including books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and personal documents, Kindle 2 can read to you.
Kindle 2 uses the same wireless delivery system as the original Kindle – Amazon Whispernet. Customers can wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, download or receive new content in less than 60 seconds, and read from their library – all without a PC, Wi-Fi hot spot, or syncing.
Author Stephen King will offer a novella, “Ur,” which will only be available on Kindle later this month.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
