On Monday, February 9, 2009, Amazon announced the Kindle 2 (Amazon Kindle-2 is an e-book reader, an embedded system for reading electronic books), which will be available for purchase starting February 24, 2009. Price of the unit is $359.00 in pre-order. The new Kindle features improved battery life, 20 percent faster page-refreshing, a text-to-speech option to read the text aloud, and overall thickeness reduced to 0.36 inches. To promote the new Kindle, author Stephen King has written a novella which will be available exclusively on Amazon.com.
The Amazon Kindle has more storage capacity and can holds over 1,500 books. Users can download content from Amazon in the proprietary Kindle format (AZW), or load unprotected Mobipocket (PRC, MOBI) or plain text content. Amazon offers an email-based service that will convert HTML, DOC (Microsoft Word), PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP documents to AZW. It also supports audio in the form of MP3s and Audible 2, 3, and 4 audiobooks, which must be transferred to the Kindle over USB, or on an SD card.
Users can select reading material through the Kindle or through a computer at Amazon Kindle store, and can download content through the Kindle Store. New releases and New York Times bestsellers are offered.
The device comes with electronic editions of its owner's manual and the New Oxford American Dictionary. The Kindle also contains several free experimental features, including a basic Web browser. Users can also play music from MP3 files in random order in the background. Operating system updates are received over the air and installed automatically.
Annotations
The user can bookmark, highlight, and look up content. Pages can be dog-eared for reference and notes can be added to relevant content. While a book is open on the display, menu options allow users to search for synonyms and definitions from the built-in dictionary. The device also remembers the last page read for each book. Pages can be saved as a "clipping", or a text file containing the text of the currently displayed page. All clippings are appended to a single file, which can be downloaded over a USB cable.
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