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Ever since Amazon unveiled its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet in September, a lingering phrase has been attached to the low-cost, high-profile device: "the iPad's first true Android competitor."

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.

The Kindle Fire tablet may be the hottest selling gadget this holiday, pressuring Amazon.com Inc's profit margins but giving the world's largest Internet retailer potentially millions of new high-spending customers.

Apple could scarcely be more dominant in the nascent tablet computing market, but Amazon could change that in a hurry, a new study suggests.

"Leaked" screen shots, allegedly from Amazon's internal stock monitoring system, suggest the new Kindle Fire tablet is already a hot item, racking up 250,000 reservations in five days.

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

After months of speculation, it's here: Amazon's tablet, the $199 Kindle Fire, was unveiled Wednesday. Smaller and cheaper than Apple's dominant iPad, the Kindle Fire has a 7-inch display and runs on a heavily customized version of Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android operating system. The tablet offers Wi-Fi connectivity, but no 3G or other cellular connection. It also lacks a camera and microphone, two features found in most rival tablets.

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.

Both Barnes & Noble and Kobo have introduced nearly identical e-readers that are clearly intended to embarrass the industry leader, the Amazon Kindle.

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.