Despite the rumours, it looks like there will be no sunny retirement for the current Kindle. From Amazon's chief spokesperson to the New York Times:

Read More »

The US$100 discount on the Kindles may be Amazon's way of clearing out the first-gen to make room for the now all-but-certain second-gen this fall. Business Week says that Amazon's hired a guy from frog design for the next version, which will have a better screen, thinner body, fewer UI annoyances and (obviously) be better looking. The price point is supposedly somewhere around the US$249-US$299 range, which might be right near the sweet spot that mainstreamers will start to pick one up as an impulse buy. That is, if mainstreamers ever really read anything. Students, on the other hand, would be a gigantic market for a Kindle Education Edition. [Business Week]

Read More »

The Kindle is currently getting a US$100 discount if you get the Amazon Rewards Visa card and buy a Kindle with it: that's a 28% discount on the list price of US$359. Good for you if you're about to buy a Kindle, and obviously will push the sales of the Kindle. It also raises a couple of questions: is the Kindle not selling as well as Amazon would like, hence the large discount, or is this tied to ditching stock before the possible Kindle 2.0 update we've mentioned before, and that's gathering momentum online? What's your take on this, chaps? [AlleyInsider via NewLaunches]

Read More »

The mad scientist behind this hack was faced with a problem. His beloved Amazon Kindle had a shattered screen and was all but dead. Distraught, he thought to himself: "what if I could sacrifice a Sony reader and perform and unholy cross species screen transplant? Yeah, it just might work because the e-ink screens on both devices are nearly identical."

Read More »

A firmware update scheduled to drop later this week will allow Sony Readers to use the .epub format, an open standard (with DRM support) that has the backing of several major book publishers. This means you'll be able to get books from sources other than Sony's own Connect store, which currently only has one third the titles of Amazon's Kindle store. The Kindle, however, currently uses the Mobipocket format for its Kindle Store books, and does not yet support .epub. [AP]

Read More »

Bad news for TiVo subscribers--the company is about to reach for new levels of advertising debauchery. If you thought those banners in the TiVo menu system were bad, know that the company is about to take things a big step further and invade actual television programming with Amazon as their partner. From the NY Times:

Read More »

Today Amazon is launching a beta of Amazon Video On Demand, which will stream TV and movies from all the major studios (save for Disney/ABC, which is still in bed with Apple) and take the place of Unbox. The service will instantly stream rentals or download purchases to your PC. But Amazon also has plans to bring it directly to TVs via Sony's Bravia Video Link. Could couch-based Amazon shopping on your TV be far behind?

Read More »

CrunchGear's got it on good authority that the next year or so will see not only an update to the current model—making it thinner and lighter—but also an altogether new model with dimensions something like a piece of loose leaf paper. They should come out in October and sometime next year, respectively, though no word on pricing. To try to sway the youth market, it's said the new Kindle's will come in trendy new colours. [CrunchGear]

My wife--who has never browsed for power tools in her life--was greeted with this page on Amazon this morning. So does a store know my wife's hobbies and interests better than I do? Meh, wouldn't be the first time. Won't be the last.

Read More »

Here's one really smart idea that will convert a few Kindle-haters: textbooks. Princeton University Press join Oxford, Yale and the UC in putting some of their titles into e-book form, allowing students to bypass the used book store and directly download their textbooks onto their Kindles. You'll save a few bucks for the digital version, plus shipping costs and shipping time. And if you figure out a way to hack it, that's like, free textbooks dude. Whoa. We see this extended to concerned parents of elementary school kids who've been complaining about how many textbooks they have to lug from home to school and back. Then again, maybe that's why your kids are so fat. [Yahoo Buzz via CSMonitor]

Read More »