Amazon Kindle, E-reader | featured news

Barnes & Noble Inc posted a lower holiday-quarter profit as investments to keep its Nook e-reader competitive with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle continued to hurt its results.

The Kindle Fire turned out to be a popular device largely because of its comparatively low price tag. it was the first sub-$200 tablet (by a buck) that didn't feel like a $25 device you'd expect to find in a Fisher Price catalog, and as a result, Amazon closed out the fourth quarter of 2011 with a 14 percent share of the global tablet market,...

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 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.

RadioShack will begin selling Barnes & Noble Nook e-readers next month. The retailer already carries iPads and Kindles.

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.

Amazon will lower the price of its electronic reader by showing ads as screensavers and at the bottom of the home screen, and by selling special offers.

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 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.