Oprah Flips for Amazon's Kindle

War with Kindle to transform business

(NEWSER) - Book publishers were locked in last-minute talks with Apple ahead of today's unveiling of the tablet, which has been touted as promising to change the publishing industry as radically as the iPod did the music industry. The tablet's model for books, which puts it in direct competition with the Amazon Kindle, moves away from the heavy e-book discounting the Kindle has brought, asking publishers to price books at $12.99 or $14.99, rather than the $9.99 Amazon favors. More»

E-reader now just $259, but cheaper Sony device is making inroads

(NEWSER) - Amazon slashed the price of its Kindle e-reader by $40 today and introduced a new edition of the device that will enable wireless downloads in 100 countries. The move brings the price of a Kindle to $259, which is still $60 more expensive than Sony's competitor. Amazon will also finally sell the Kindle to customers outside of the US, although most of the titles in the Kindle's store are in English. More»

(NEWSER) - Nicholson Baker wanted to like the Kindle, honest. But when he unwrapped it and began to see what all the fuss was about, he "tussled with a sense of anti-climax," the prolific author writes in the New Yorker. Things never improved. He slams the e-reader for having a "greenish, sickly gray" screen, cruddy images, and limited selection of books. Amazon "is very good at selling things," he writes. "It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things." More»

Convenient apps have attractive interface, features: Mossberg

(NEWSER) - E-book applications for the iPhone are a source of competition for dedicated reading gizmos like Amazon’s Kindle. After testing two popular e-book apps, Walt Mossberg finds that both have attractive features, but currently can’t match the 200,000-strong catalog of digital books—especially new bestsellers—available for the Kindle, he writes in the Wall Street Journal. More»

Chain sick of customers checking out products before buying them on Amazon

(NEWSER) - In a sign of rising tension between online stores and their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, Target says it is going to stop selling Amazon's Kindle products. The company, one of the biggest offline sellers of Amazon's e-readers and tablets, has become fed up with shoppers using its stores as a showroom for Amazon, checking out products there before buying them online, reports the New York Times . Amazon encourages the practice and ran a promotion last year offering shoppers 5% off any item scanned at a store. More»