Amazon's Kindle 2 takes shape, due on Feb 9?

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Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, despite its low specs, has proved a hit with consumers, particularly after Oprah Winfrey featured it on her show in November. Since then, it’s been consistently sold out, and Amazon’s product page, for a long time, has shown a wait of 11-13 weeks for the device.

Well, last night that was changed to show 4-6 weeks, and Amazon has invited journalists to an event in New York on February 9th with the Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, present. Leaked photos suggest that the old angular look is gone, and the new Kindle will be more rounded. It’ll also feature a much-updated e-ink display with a faster screen refresh time. If it replicates the success of the original, then we might even see it this side of the Atlantic. We can only hope.

Kindle Product Page (via NY Times, image via BGR)

Related posts: Amazon with more Kindles in the pipeline – definitely smaller, hopefully cheaper | Amazon Kindle spotted in the wild, being read by The Onion editor of all people!

Esquire magazine thinks that the 21st century begins in September, thanks to E-Ink

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Despite what the header may imply, E-Ink is not a mind-altering narcotic (although I’ve personally never tried drinking the contents of a Sony Reader). E-Ink is in fact an amazing new-ish type of electronic paper that could revolutionise the way we think about books and magazines. You can already see its extremely impressive abilities in the aforementioned Sony device, as well as its rival, the Amazon Kindle. This does not explain the appalling time keeping at Esquire though.

MWC 2008: Hands on with the Readius rollable e-ink phone

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It was at last year’s 3GSM show in Barcelona that we first clapped eyes on Polymer Vision’s Readius e-book display. The show’s name may have changed to Mobile World Congress, but Polymer Vision was still there this year, showing the latest version of the device, which is now a fully-fledged mobile phone, as we recently reported.

Opinion: Amazon's Kindle won't make E-Books popular but how hard can it be?

Jon_smal.gifJonathan Weinberg writes…

I don’t read as much as I used to, one look at the amount of books in my house is enough evidence to tell that story. Not that I don’t have many, oh no, I’ve got shelves full of novels and non-fiction. It’s just most of them are bought on a whim, and then a few pages in swapped for something else or put down to play the Xbox 360 or check out the telly.

Children too aren’t reading as much as they should. In fact, David Cameron, the Tory leader, is about to announce plans to try and get every
youngster up to speed with their reading by the age of six. It’s a massive failure in any education system when kids can’t pick out enough words to enjoy a story without it being spoken to them…

Rumour: Sony preparing to launch revamped PRS-505 Reader devices

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E-Books. Still not big. But give it time: the publishing industry and technology firms are gradually getting themselves into alignment to give e-books a proper marketing push.

Sony’s Reader device could be at the forefront of that, particularly now it’s getting two new models with more internal storage and tweaked controls. The new models are both called the PRS-505, with one being silver and the other being blue.