Amazon, Kindle | featured news

The new Kindle Paperwhite isn't the perfect character. Just like the literary creations that live and die on its screen, it has flaws. It's wise, though it still suffers from memories of its past. But in the great e-reader saga, it's clearly the protagonist, and one worth rooting for.

With the rumblings from Amazon about the early success of its new Kindle Fire over the holiday season, the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results came as a surprise. More surprising was Amazon’s silence regarding total Kindle Fire sales for the quarter. During the earnings call, Amazon’s executive team deferred questions about the device to the press release, which simply regurgitated sales data from December.

SolarFocus will introduce SolarKindle, billed as “the world’s first solar powered e-reader cover” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which gets underway on Monday. The cover will have a built-in solar panel with a dual-charging (USB and solar) reserve battery. The company said that there is “a guarentee of three-months of unplugged Kindle use” under normal sunlight environment.

The trio of Kindle e-readers took the three top places on Amazon’s best sellers on their site. In fact, over one million Kindles have been sold per week for the month of December. Every country that has an Amazon site showed the Kindle Fire as their top-selling product.

After more than a year of missteps by Apple's tablet rivals, at least one viable competitor, Amazon's Kindle Fire, appears to have surfaced for the popular iPad. Amazon.com Inc. on Monday trumpeted the success of its recently launched Kindle Fire tablet, part of a family of Kindle products that include low-priced e-readers. The company said it sold more than four times as many Kindle products on Black Friday last week as the same shopping day in 2010.

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched a Kindle lending library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book.

Amazon's Kindle Fire is a Catch-22 for retailers: The $199 tablet computer could both help Christmas traffic and hurt future sales.

Amazon’s souped-up color version of its Kindle e-reader hopes to undercut the iPad in price and steal away a couple of million in unit sales by Christmas.

Amazon.com said it will allow readers to borrow Kindle books free at more than 11,000 U.S. libraries, a new twist in the growing battle for market share among electronic tablet makers.

Amazon.com Inc said sales of its Kindle e-reader were strong over the holiday season amid competition from devices such as Apple Inc's iPad, a computer tablet that also has e-reader capabilities.