Tag Archives | Amazon Kindle

Amazon HTML5-izes Kindle

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 30, 2010 at 11:36 am

This is intriguing: Amazon is saying that it will soon roll out the ability to view Kindle books in an HTML5-capable browser–complete with fancy formatting, color pictures, and rich media.

Its initial use of this capability isn’t that big a whoop–it’ll let book lovers sample a tome in their browser before buying it for consumption on a Kindle e-reader, smartphone, or other device. But there’s presumably no reason why the company couldn’t expand on the idea with a fully cloud-based incarnation of Kindle. What if you could pay a flat monthly fee for streaming access to all the books you could read?

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Kindle for Android: Basic, But Still Welcome

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 29, 2010 at 12:19 am

On Sunday night, Amazon began embedding audio and/or video in a handful of Kindle e-books for the iPhone and iPad. On Monday, it released a Kindle e-reader for Android phones–and it can’t play those sounds and movies. As with other first incarnations of Kindle apps, it gets the job done but feels a bit bare bones: For instance, if you tap on your phone’s Search button while you’re reading a book, you get a message saying that search is coming soon.

This is still good news for Android handset owners–especially ones who (like me) have already invested in Kindle e-books. It also cements Kindle’s position as the most widely-deployed of the e-reading apps associated with a major book merchant: You can read Kindle books on Amazon’s devices, PCs, Macs, iPhones (and iPod Touches), iPads, BlackBerries, and now Android phones. ePub, championed by Barnes & Noble, Sony, and others is more theoretically open, but it’s kind of moot so long as everyone wraps their e-books up in copy protection and Amazon’s books work with the widest variety of hardware.

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Kindle Books for iPhone, iPad Get Audio and Video

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 28, 2010 at 12:13 am

When Kindle books debuted back in 2007, they contained only words and grainy black-and-white photos. Last year, they got color pictures when they arrived on the iPhone (and later on Windows PCs, Macs, and the iPad). And now a handful of Kindle books pack multimedia features, thanks to new editions that can play back audio and video when you view them on an iPhone, an iPod Touch, or an iPad.

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Borders Sort of Responds to the E-Reader Price Wars. You Out There, Sony?

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2010 at 2:24 pm

As of Sunday night, the Kobo e-reader sold by Borders was a $150 gadget that dramatically undercut the $259 pricetag on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Then B&N cut the Nook’s price to $199 and introduced a $149 model, and Amazon responded by knocking the Kindle down to $189. The Kobo is still a cheap e-reader, but not strikingly so–especially considering that it has neither a 3G connection nor Wi-Fi.

So Borders has taken action, but not in the form of a straight price reduction: It’s including a $20 gift card with purchase of the Kobo, reducing the effective cost of the e-reader to $129. I don’t think Kobo matters enough (at least not yet) for Amazon or B&N to feel forced to react to this price cut. But I suspect that before all the product introductions and price reductions are done with, we’ll see three standard price points for e-readers: $200 or thereabouts for 3G models, $150 or thereabouts for slightly less fancy ones, and $99 or thereabouts for basic models that you might still plausibly want to own.

Still to be heard from: Sony, whose $169.99 Reader Pocket Edition and $199.99 Reader Touch Edition are now a tad pricey–and whose already-big-ticket $349.99 Daily Edition is totally out of whack with the e-reader economics that Barnes & Noble and Borders established yesterday,

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Kindle Heading to a Target Store Near You

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 2, 2010 at 1:48 pm

Amazon is taking a step in to brick-and-mortar retailing by offering its Kindle e-book device in all Target stores beginning on Sunday. The device was initially made available at Target’s flagship location in Minneapolis and stores across Florida on April 25.

Target called the response to the Kindle in its stores “overwhelmingly positive,” which spurred its decision to offer the device across its entire chain. The higher-end discount store would be the first brick-and-mortar location to carry the device.

Competitor Barnes & Noble struck a deal with electronics retailer Best Buy to carry the Nook, which went on sale across the chain a week before the Kindle first appeared in Target. The electronics merchant has also placed Barnes & Noble’s desktop software on some of the laptops and desktops it sells.

The Kindle will sell for $259, the same price that it is available for on Amazon.com.

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Dreaming of the Superkindle

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 18, 2010 at 12:35 am

I’m pleased by the news–inevitable though it was –that Amazon is working on a Kindle app for Android phones. But I’m more intrigued by this Nick Bilton post at NYTimes.com on Amazon’s current hiring spree for its Kindle team. Amazon surely has a strategy in place for the future of its e-reader platform–one which must respond to the arrival of the iPad, even if it responds mostly by studiously ignoring it. It’s going to be fun to watch it unfold.

So What Will Bezos Do? The way I see it, Amazon has four major options.

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Kindle to Hit Target?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 7, 2010 at 9:38 pm

Of all the many differences between the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle, one of the least-discussed is actually pretty important: You can easily try out an iPad in person before you plunk down your money, but the Kindle is a mail-order product, and therefore one you may need to buy sight unseen. (Maybe you know someone who has one you can try out, and maybe not.) But Engadget says that it looks like the Kindle is coming to Target later this month.

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Your Move, Amazon

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 1, 2010 at 10:58 am

One of the many interesting questions raised by the iPad is this: What’s Amazon gonna do? I hope that it’ll shortly unveil a clever new Kindle of some sort–clever new products are always more interesting than price reductions–but lowering the cost of the current model to $149 also sounds like it would be a rational response…

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