Amazon Kindle 2: Read all about it…

Unless you’re the Blue Peter tortoise hibernating for the winter, you may have heard of the Amazon Kindle 2 and its launch yesterday. It’s set to become one of the biggest gadgets of the year, with some even hailing yesterday’s launch as “an iPod moment”. Whether that’s overstating it a bit remains to be seen, but there is plenty to suggest that the Kindle 2 could take the world by storm.

Just look at the original device. That was the world’s first connected e-reader, and it had the distinct advantage of having the backing of the world’s biggest online bookshop. Amazon sold 190,000 Kindles since it was launched. Costing $360 each, that means Amazon has generated almost $68.5 million in revenue from kindle hardware alone. Kindle-owners also account for ten per cent of all Amazon e-books downloaded. That’s not bad figures for an e-book.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos himself has admitted that e-books aren’t exactly the easiest products to sell, stating that there used to be more of a hunger for “short-form reading” (blog posts, news stories), but now there’s a trend starting that suggests long-form reading might just be fighting back. And with the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function it’s even muscling in on the audio-book market.

But it’s not just about the books. Newspapers and magazines are signing up to the Kindle way of thinking as well, with the likes of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and USA Today sending morning newspapers direct to Kindles all over America. They download automatically for their owners to read in the morning, and line the publisher’s pockets too. Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines all serve up digital copies, too, wirelessly of course.

The new device, being slimmer and faster at downloading books, will surely be at least as popular as the original. To take a look at that iPod analogy again, the original ‘Pod was actually pretty clunky in design and use. Now it’s a touchscreen masterpiece. The Kindle 2 is 20 per cent faster than its predecessor, downloads books, mags and papers in less than 60 seconds, and is altogether a more attractive proposition.

If Amazon can market the Kindle 2 properly, then there’s every possibility that it’ll take the world by storm. After all, it’s a growing market. Plus, unless your a magician with deep pockets, how else are you going to carry 1,500 books around with you?

Like the sound of the Amazon Kindle 2? Get chatting about it on the PriceRunner forums.

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