Amazon, E-reader | 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.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) (BKS), the largest U.S. bookstore chain, introduced a Nook e-reader with a screen that glows in the dark, challenging Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) (AMZN) at a time when prices for digital books may start falling.

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,...

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.

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.

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 Inc. on Thursday said that, after less than four years of selling electronic books, it's now selling more of them than printed books. The online retailer said that since April 1, it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books, including printed books for which there is no electronic edition. The comparison excludes free e-books, which would tip the scales further if they were included.

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.