Technology, Amazon Kindle | featured news

One month after Amazon announced that its third-generation Kindle "eclipsed 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' as the bestselling product in Amazon’s history," CEO Jeff Bezos announces: "Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com."

Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos cut prices and added features to the Kindle to defend it against a threat from Apple Inc. in the fast- growing market for electronic readers. Amazon introduced two new versions of the device today, including a $139 model that works with Wi-Fi. A second version, with 3G mobile technology as well as Wi-Fi to download books, costs $189. Bloomberg News reported details in May about Amazon’s plans for the Kindle, its bestselling product.

The e-reader's introduces a new social features. PCMag takes it for a for a test drive.

Good news, Android owners! One of the iPhone and iPad's best mobile applications, the Amazon Kindle app, is coming soon to phones running the Google Android mobile operating system. Like all Kindle products, the Android app will include Amazon's Whispersync technology, which synchronizes reading progress, notes and bookmarks across devices including Kindle brand e-readers, desktop software and mobile applications.

Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader is getting access to Facebook and Twitter, along with several other enhancements, as part of a software update being sent wirelessly to the devices.

In a posting on Amazon's site, the company says the new software will let users share book passages on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The update will also let people sort books and documents into collections and lock their Kindle with a password. There also will be larger font options and the ability to zoom in on PDF documents.

Amazon.com has unveiled a program that will give authors and publishers a larger share of revenue from each Kindle e-book they sell beginning on June 30, 2010. The 70-percent royalty option offers 70 percent of list price ...

Last month, Amazon’s Kindle broke sales records as it was once again a hot item to give this holiday season. When countless people turned on their new Christmas Kindles for the first time yesterday, what do you think was the first thing that they did? That’s right: they bought ebooks to fill up their Kindle hard drives. A lot of them.