Results tagged “kindle”

KOMO reports that UW is testing out the use of the Amazon Kindle in their classrooms this fall. The University's Computer Science & Engineering Department will give every CS&E graduate student a Kindle DX, which will replace textbooks and research papers in their first-year courses. Kindle-edition textbooks and other materials will also be given to them free of charge. Amazon's sending Kindle DXs to six other universities throughout the United States. UW will be the first to get the book-killers.

Gizmodo is reporting a really, really bad thing: Amazon has deleted digital books from customers' Kindles after they've already bought them. The kicker? The books were Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. (This irony is delicious! Where did you get it?) Gizmodo says the publisher "changed its mind" about having electronic versions, which we don't actually believe. We don't see Amazon bowing and scraping before publishers much, let alone offering to break into customers' devices for them to erase purchased products. Stay tuned for the full story--just maybe not on a Kindle.

Amazon is getting sued for broken Kindles and promises to replace them at no charge. JP Morgan says there will be no new layoffs in Seattle, where it purged WaMu's operations after taking it over several months ago. More UW scientists are cashing in on their lab work and raising venture capital to go into the biofuel business.

Looks like someone reading a book doesn't it? Well, yes and no. That's a Kindle! With a nightlight attachment, even. It may seem a small thing, but after writing post after post about the Kindle, we'd still never actually seen one al fresco, as it were. (Which, interestingly, we heard the other day isn't used by Italians the way we use it to mean outdoor dining.) However the other day, the geek planets aligned and we spotted this person whiling away the time before a SIFF screening, so we snapped a picture with our iPhone.

We only know one person who owns a Kindle, so we often forget to mention you can subscribe to Seattlest at the Kindle Store for just $1.99.

While we were reporting on Project Red Dress, we got a chance to schmooze with Seattle chapter of Fashion Group International board members Susan (Regional Director-Elect and Treasurer) and Janaea (Programs Chair), also the founders of Beauty Revolution magazine, Seattle's online beauty and fashion magazine. We caught up with them again online and conducted a Google Talk interview, because we're cool like that.

You no longer have to buy a Kindle or give Amazon.com any money in order to access the bulk of Kindle content and features, thanks to a new application (download here) released by the Seattle-based book giant today which allows you to read, highlight, and bookmark e-books Kindle-style on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Just last month, Seattlest got to handle our first Kindle; its owner had to gently inform us that the first-generation version did not in fact have a touch screen after a full minute of watching our grimy fingers scooting along the surface in vain. If you have one of the old Kindles and don't want to invest in a new one just for the touch screen feature, now you have options. iPhone-owning readers: will you be downloading this app? [MvB: Just did.]

Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos, with his cueball head and giraffe neck, appeared on the Daily Show last night to shill for his high-falutin' e-book reader:

Last August, we wrote this postscript to a post about the Kindle's holiday sales prospects: "I didn't want to write a separate post, but if I were doing marketing at a newspaper, I'd start figuring out if bundling a 2-year subscription and a bulk Kindle buy would knock down the price enough to horn in on some of this Xmas shopping action. Not only would the newspaper subscriber get a Kindle, but it would actually come with something to read every day."

We take a break from chronicling the collapse of the economy for some happier news. CrunchGear says Kindle 2.0 is finally on the horizon: "We’ve got a seat at another conference on Monday, February 9, and unless they’re announcing a Bezos-themed amusement park in the Ukraine, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see the Kindle 2." Here's a second source, doubters. The design is supposed to be significantly upgraded, but the question everyone has is how much the new candy costs. Will Amazon stick to its $359 guns? And will they make more than 500 of them this time?

There's talk that Kindle sales have hit a wall recently, so we have a new slogan for Amazon: "RE: Kindle your love of reading." *crickets* Well, we have all sorts of buzz to report, too. First, there's the 8.5" x 11" textbook edition of Kindle. Then there's that $100-off-a-Kindle deal. Finally, there's the Kindle 2.0 rumor-mongering: "[T]he new version is significantly thinner, has a better screen, is more stylish and includes fixes to some of the user interface annoyances with the first version." Now how much would you pay? $249-$299?

We don't have a shred of evidence for that headline; it's a gut thing. We're rollin' Jack Fuckin' Welch-style. But Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney does predict this will be a Kindle Christmas; he's doubled his sales estimates to nearly 400,000 units. At $359 per, that's over $136 million from a single product. Mahaney says Amazon's e-reader will bring in $1 billion by 2010. This projection is based on the Kindle selling as many units in its first year as the iPod. No one outside of Amazon knows how many that is--Mahaney is guesstimating, using in part the 4,000+ mostly positive Kindle reviews on Amazon's site, more than half of which give it 5 out of 5 stars. Our favorite contrarian response? Peter Kafka says hold on a sec: "iPod users immediately had access to thousands of songs they already owned the minute they synced their machines to their computers. And they could get anything else they wanted for free (if they chose to steal). Kindle users, however, are pretty much forced to pay $9.99 each time they want a new title."

Sure, you can read this extraordinary site every single day on your internet-connected computer (or iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) for free. But if you've made the investment in a certain electronic reading device, you can now subscribe to Seattlest on your Kindle, and ensure you will have no reason to turn on your computer ever again. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

John Markoff of the NY Times talked gadgets with Steve Jobs.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

Continue reading "Steve Jobs On the Kindle: "The Whole Conception Is Flawed""