Amazon’s New eBook Reader Kindle Rises in Popularity

Amazon.com’s new offering, an e-book reader called Kindle, has been an instant hit among Internet users across the world, with the company announcing that the product had sold out at its website, and that new stocks would be available only December 17, 2007. As with most such popular products, the Kindle has been the subject of much discussion.

So what is all the talk about? Basically, the Amazon Kindle is a portable e-book reader. You can use the Kindle to download different forms of e-content, such as e-books, blogs, newspapers, and even magazines to a high resolution e-paper display.

Kindle comes at a price of $399. It does not need a computer, and also does not have any subscription fee attached to it. Amazon Whispernet, which is what Kindle runs on, uses the same high speed data network (EVDO) that cell phone operators use across the United States.

Users can shop at the Kindle store, which has over 90,000 books in the Kindle store, quite a few of which costing just $9.99. They can also download/receive new content; and they do not even need a PC, WiFi, or syncing to do this.

Customers can subscribe to Kindle Newspapers as well, for a price of $5.99 to $14.99 per month. Kindle magazine subscriptions cost anywhere between $1.25 and $3.49 per month, while blog subscriptions cost just $0.99 per month.

There are other advantages to using Kindle as well. It weighs just 10.3 ounces and is small enough to fit in one hand. It has six font sizes that the customer can adjust. Besides, its on-board memory is enough to store over 200 titles. To increase that capability, all the user has to do is buy an additional SD memory card.

That is not all. For every book a customer buys, there is a backup available on Amazon.com. This enables customers to make space for new titles on Kindle, knowing that there is a backup for their older titles on Amazon.

Customers can access The New Oxford American Dictionary from Kindle, and also access Wikipedia.org, where they can go through more than 2,000,000 articles generated by other users. Through Kindle, users can also send Word documents and pictures through e-mails to their Kindle e-mail ids for a nominal fee of $0.10 per mail.

Users can send a range of files through Kindle, including MS Word files, HTML, TXT, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and BMP files. This is from the point of view of users. From the point of view of authors and publishers, they can make content available to users through the Digital Text Platform (DTP), a new Amazon offering that allows people to upload and sell their content at the Kindle Store.

Kindle has been the subject of discussion among booksellers on Amazon’s discussion board, the Seller Soapbox, and also eBay. The discussion at the Seller’s Soapbox centered on whether the e-book would be a threat to the bookselling business.

While some online booksellers feel Kindle may have a negative impact when it came to textbooks, most others did not seem too concerned about the whole thing. There was absolutely no discussion on Half.com, a popular eBay site for used books.