After a recent Kindle 2.5 Update, Amazon is now set to unveil a thinner version of the popular Kindle e-reader in August say two sources, who also say the new, updated model will have a more receptive screen. The display will also have “sharper picture,” but will not have colour or be touch screen, as some had guessed.
Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007 to slow sales, which have since grown, with one report claiming the e-tailer has sold 3.3 million units of the device, to date. Also Apple sold over 1 million iPads in just the first month, and international sales began today, with hundreds of thousands of sales expected in the coming weeks. The device faces increasing pressure from rivals however, as the Apple iPad is a hit, and Sony and Barnes & Noble have both released devices that have better specs than the Kindle, at a similar price.
Generally many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around. Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, which let customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google’s Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company’s website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.
Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said this week that the company was concentrating on wooing committed book readers and that a color display screen is “some ways out.”
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