Technology, E-reader | featured news

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.

FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

In my teens, I never went on vacation without my yellow Sony Walkman. Today's travel gear may be more sophisticated, but the premise is the same: high tech toys that help out when it's time for R&R. When I'm leaving on a trip, I spend hours syncing iPads, iPhones, and eReaders with my media library so I can watch new episodes of AMC's "The Killing," listen to tech podcasts, or read ebooks. But you need fun gear to play all of this digital content too.

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.

Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann, is buying Smashing Ideas, a digital firm that creates book apps.

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."