According to Amazon, Kindle wirelessly downloads books, magazines, newspapers and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution 6-inch electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle utilizes the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so you never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Readers around the world can pre-order Kindle today for $279 at www.amazon.com/kindle and it will begin shipping October 19.
“We have millions of customers in countries all over the world who read English-language books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Kindle enables these customers to think of a book and download it wirelessly in less than 60 seconds.”
The Kindle Store offers international customers over 200,000 English-language books, including New Releases and New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically priced less than physical editions. Over 1,000 different rights-holders now have books available in the Kindle Store, including leading publishers Atlantic Books, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Faber and Faber, Hachette, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Penguin, Profile Books, Quercus, Simon & Schuster and Wiley.
“Penguin is a leading supplier of digital books to Kindle in the US and we are delighted to be extending that successful partnership to the rest of the world,” said John Makinson, CEO of Penguin, the world’s largest publisher of English language books. “The publishing industry is experiencing explosive growth in digital book sales in the US and we hope to stimulate digital buying elsewhere by making our content widely available on new devices.”
“At Faber and Faber we are always seeking new ways of finding readers for the writers we publish, so we're excited by Kindle's launch beyond the US, and to be developing our strong partnership with Amazon beyond physical books,” said Faber and Faber Ltd Publisher and Chief Executive Stephen Page.
Over 85 top US and international newspapers and magazines are also available in the Kindle Store for single purchase or subscription. Many international newspapers are available in the Kindle Store for the first time, including La Stampa (Italy), El País (Spain), El Universal (Mexico), O Globo (Brazil), The Daily Telegraph (UK), joining top papers such as The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Le Monde (France), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany) and The Washington Post. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle.
Customers around the world can now enjoy the same features, says Amazon, that have helped make Kindle the #1 bestselling product on Amazon.com, including:
* Slim and Trim: At just over a third of an inch thin (0.36 inches) and weighing just over 10 ounces, Kindle is pencil thin and lighter than a typical paperback.
* 3G Wireless: Readers living in or traveling to Kindle’s wireless coverage areas can wirelessly shop the Kindle Store, download books in less than 60 seconds, automatically receive newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and receive personal documents—all without a PC, Wi-Fi hot spot, or syncing. Customers who are not in the coverage area can quickly transfer content to Kindle over USB.
* Reads Like Real Paper: Kindle’s 6-inch electronic ink display reads like printed words on paper because the screen works using real ink and doesn’t use a backlight, eliminating the eyestrain and glare associated with other electronic displays.
* Stores Up To 1,500 Books: Kindle’s 2 GB of memory holds up to 1,500 books and Kindle books are automatically backed up by Amazon so customers can re-download titles in their library.
* Read For Weeks On A Single Charge: Kindle’s electronic paper display sips battery power so users can read for over two weeks with wireless turned off and up to four days on a single charge with wireless on.
* Read-To-Me: With the experimental Text-To-Speech feature, Kindle can read most newspapers, magazines and books out loud.
* Automatically Syncs With Kindle and Kindle Compatible Devices: Amazon’s “Whispersync” technology automatically syncs customers’ last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle compatible devices like Kindle for iPhone.
* Wirelessly Receive and Read Personal Documents: Wirelessly send, receive, and read personal documents in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF.
* Instant Dictionary Lookup: Kindle comes with the New Oxford American Dictionary and over 250,000 definitions that appear instantly at the bottom of the page.
* Choose Text Size: Kindle lets readers customize their reading preference by providing six different text sizes.
* Bookmarks, Notes, and Highlights: By using the QWERTY keyboard Kindle users can add annotations to text, as well as highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use.
About Amazon.com
Amazon says: “Amazon.com, Inc, a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.”
