Get the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and Get $100 Off Kindle
Thanks to Chase, you get $100 off Kindle when you get the new Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card. Limited time only. Here’s how this works: 1) Apply Online. Get a response in as little as 30 seconds. If you’re approved, we will instantly add the card to your Amazon.com account and you’ll get $30 back on your credit card statement after your purchase. 2) Add a Kindle to your cart. 3) Place your order using the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card and enter this promo code: VISACARD to get the additional $70 savings at checkout. Additional restrictions apply.

Now you might be thinking why is Chase offering to subsidise you up to $100 for a Kindle, well, they want you to start using their credit card called the Amazon.com Rewards Visa card, and over time Chase hopes to recoup the $100 through interest payments. The promotion is offered and paid for by Chase, not Amazon, so for those who have bought the Kindle in the past couple of weeks, Amazon wont refund you the $70 that Chase is subsidising the Kindle.

Once your approved for the card, which Amazon says takes less than a minute, Chase will add $30 in credit to your Amazon.com Rewards Visa card. Once the card is added to your Amazon.com account you can add the Kindle to your shopping cart and apply the “VISACARD” discount code for an additional $70 off. This code will only work if you add Kindle to you cart and go through the normal checkout process and don’t use 1-click, the discount should work even if you already have the Amazon.com Rewards Visa card, unfortunately the $30 credit is for new card customers only.

A Kindle for $259 was an offer too good for me to pass, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about getting a Kindle for my wife, once I heard about this offer my mind was made up - I was going to get it. Once I was approved for the card, sure enough I put the “VISACARD” code in and a $70 discount was applied to the Kindle. My wife’s shiny new Kindle should arrive on Monday, perfect.

Now I’m not a big user/fan of credit cards in any case, I religiously pay whatever I owe off every month, but since there isn’t a yearly fee for having the Amazon rewards card, I don’t mind applying for it, I guess it will just sit there nicely in my wallet. If you do decide to go for it, make sure you pay it off and don’t drive yourself into debt, if you don’t trust yourself you can always cut the card up as soon as you get it.

Will you be taking advantage of this offer?

Source: Amazon.com

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This is what Amazon said on its blog;

Our goal is to make every title available for Kindle, and to that end some eagle-eyed Kindle owners and enthusiasts have already noticed and been using a new tool to help us do just that. If you’re frustrated that a physical edition of a book is not (yet) available in Kindle version, just look below the book’s image on its product detail page and you’ll find a box that reads, “Please tell the publisher.” Click on the “I’d like to read this book on Kindle” link and we’ll forward your request. Make your voice heard.

It is a nice feature which will hopefully be used by Kindle owners to highlight old and new books which publishers haven’t bothered to Kindle-ize, yet. It would be also nice if once you have submitted you request to be notified by Amazon if the book does become available on the Kindle,

Next step is magazines and newspapers which should also have this button.

Source: Official Amazon Kindle Blog

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U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold them for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.

Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.

I have been aware of agents searching through laptops and copying the data, and in some cases even seizing them for prolonged times, which is one reason why I don’t take my laptop with me on flights. However, seizing any electronic device without suspicion of wrongdoing is very worrying.

It gets worse;

The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes — as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials, the report said.

Basically any electronic device can be seized, including out beloved Kindle arbitrarily and indefinitely.

Books are not expect either, which seems odd. The last time I went through US border security I was reading “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria, a fabulous book by the way, considering that most people will think your an American-hating traitor for reading this book, it could have been seized along with my other electronic devices, which included my cellphone, iPod and Nintendo DS. Thankfully it was in my carry-on bag, the border agent didn’t see it and I passed through without a problem, which was a good thing since I was only halfway through the book!

So just a word of warning to Kindle owners, either keep your Kindle hidden, or hope you don’t run into a paranoid TSA agent at the airport.

Source: Reuters

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Appearing at number 9 on the list, the Time Magazine article says;

Amazon’s first-generation e-book reader certainly needs improvement — the page-turn buttons are awkwardly placed, among other things — but anyone who likes to read on the road should consider it an essential companion. That’s because you can take a veritable library with you.

Time still couldn’t resist a quick jab at the Kindle.

Other gadgets which made it onto the list include, Airport Express, MacBook Air, Panasonic Portable DVD and a PSP amongst other things, interestingly not a single bad word was said about any of the other gadgets.

Source: Time

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AbeBooks touts itself as a leader in rare and hard-to-find books. Russell Grandinetti, VP of books for Amazon.com said “AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide, AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We’re excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth.”

Hannes Blum, chief executive of AbeBooks, said that he was “very excited” about the acquisition. “This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience,”

Founded in 1996, AbeBooks charges members a monthly subscription fee to list their books, the website has over 110 million rare and out-of-print books listed.

Amazon expects to close the acquisition of AbeBooks before the end of the year for an undisclosed sum–rumoured to be between $90-$120 million–and is still subject to regulatory approvals. The takeover is the third major acquisition Amazon has made this year. It took over digital book download site Audible for $300m in March and also bought on-line fabric store Fabric.com in June.

How does it effect the Kindle?

There wont be any immediate effects for Kindle owners because AbeBooks wasn’t in the e-book business, however the acquisition of AbeBooks shows that Amazon is ruthlessly buying up its competition which is a loss for the consumer. In fact AbeBooks is the antithesis of of what Amazon has done lately with pushing into electronic books with the Kindle and hosting Web 2.0 services like EC2, S3, and its recently launched Flexible Payment Service.

I don’t anticipate any new services from Amazon since they have stated that they will keep AbeBooks as a stand-alone operation, one thing that AbeBooks is great at is connecting book lovers with small, independent book stores and allowing them to discover titles which no major book retailer sells.

AbeBooks business model doesn’t really apply to e-books since a copy of the a book can always be stored on Amazons server, forever. Perhaps in the future when e-books are more commonplace then a service like AbeBooks would be beneficial to Kindle owners allowing them to discover obscure authors or controversial content which publishers wont ever print.

Can AbeBooks somehow incorporate its service for Kindle owners?

Source: Amazon, Marketwatch, Techvibes

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240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November 2007, according to TechCrunch, that’s what their source claims. We know that Amazon always stays coy about sales as part of its company policy so we may never get any conformation from Amazon about this.

TechCrunch says that their source is close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers, possibly the same source that claimed Kindle v2 is on it’s way this fall — we’ve yet to see any evidence of that prediction.

TechCrunch goes on to say;

Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).

From these numbers is appears that Kindle is already a profitable operation and has been so from the beginning, however, what we don’t know is whether after research and development costs have been factored in if the Kindle project overall is in profitability.

Wall Street has also came out with some new estimates;

Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., predicts that Amazon is on track to sell 500,000 to 750,000 more Kindles over the next four quarters (including this one). He estimates that Kindle owners will buy an additional $120 to $150 worth of books and other content for each device, bringing the total revenues over that time period to somewhere between $225 million and $355 million. Based on that, he values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon.

So by this time next year there could possible be over a million Kindle’s sold by Amazon. In May, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney was estimating that total sales of Kindle’s this year would only reach 189,000. The image below shows what he thought would happen. Turns out that his numbers were way off, that’s analysts for you! Its time for him to significantly revise his estimate.

240,000 Kindle’s shipped, would you call it a success? It certainly has proved the nay-sayers wrong, it’s proved Wall Street wrong as-well.

If the numbers are to be believed, then its a wonderful start for the Kindle, the revenue from hardware sales alone is an estimated $100 million. When you begin to add on book sales, Amazon looks like its earning some major money for its shareholders.

Source: TechCrunch

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The images above are from a test conducted by Cartwright Reed, with the iPhone on the left and Kindle on the right showing The Stand by Stephen King.

From Cartwright Reed

The smaller, brighter iPhone screen is showing the same number of words as the Kindle. The Kindle is the premiere ebook reader, but I think that the eReader/iPhone combination is compelling. Listening to music while reading off the iPhone screen is a great experience.

The Kindle is still the winner when you’re buying ebooks, though. I bought a few titles from Fictionwise and eReader from the iPhone, but it’s not nearly as easy as Kindle’s Whispernet experience. Of course, you can only go to one bookstore on the Kindle :-).

What is interesting is that the iPhone can squeeze the same amount of words onto the screen as the Kindle, however I suspect you will be squinting quite hard as you try and read the the tiny font on the iPhone. The only solution would be to increase the font size which means less words per screen, which means more page flipping.

Source: Cartwright Reed

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From CrunchGear;

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The rendering to the right is NOT what the new Kindle will look like - we hope - it’s CrunchGears own rendering. However, according to the article, Amazon will be making the new Kindles available in a variety of colours to make the device more appealing to a younger audience, so buying a pink Kindle is not out of the question - yet.

Reportedly, the first model will be a smaller incarnation of the existing Kindle with the same sized screen and an “improved interface”. The source goes on to say that the newer smaller Kindle will have “skipped three or four generations” it will be interesting to see exactly what this means, a new eInk display perhaps or a new operating system? The second new version will be shaped like a 8.5 - 11 inch sheet of paper and will be noticeably larger than the current model, it will hit shelves early next year.

There is no word on the pricing structure, or indeed if it means that the existing Kindle will be reduced in price - we hope so.

We would advise that you take this news with a pinch of salt because Jeff Bezos said this at “D: All Things Digital Conference” back in May;

“There will be a second version, a third version, a tenth version. … but a second version is not that near.”

Was Jeff deceiving us? I don’t think he was, however I think the most likely reality is that Amazon is refreshing the product line - just like the Apple did with the iPod. First we had the iPod, then along came the iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle and iPod Touch, most likely that is what is going on. Amazon is offering different flavours of the Kindle depending on your reading habits, a “Kindle Nano” if you occasional reader, a “Classic Kindle” if your a major bookworm etc…

This rumour has thrown a gigantic spanner in the works if you were thinking of purchasing a Kindle any time soon.

Source: CrunchGear

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“on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”

That’s according to a Time magazine source inside Amazon, now consider that just two months ago Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sat down with with Walt Mossberg at “D: All Things Digital Conference” and said;

“Title-by-title basis…Kindle unit sales more than 6% of total book sales”

Incredible! A doubling of sales in the publishing industry is unheard of! in two months Amazon has managed doubled sales with a device which many critics claimed was not ready for prime time. The supply problems and pessimistic early reviews haven’t dented growth at all.

Which begs the question, have Kindle users started to purchase more e-books? and is that because e-books are significantly cheaper than their printed counterparts? or has Amazon been selling a stack load of Kindle’s, far more than previously thought.

Time magazine has a theory;

A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month. At the same time, the Kindle is quirkier than your average gadget, and consumers are learning how to use it. It’s possible that as Kindle owners warm up to the gadget — and as the library of titles rapidly grows — they increase the rate of their purchases. We now return you to more scrutable data points…

So we are asking you, have to started to purchase more e-books for your Kindle now that you have had the device for a few months? or have you recently purchased the Kindle and was that because of the price drop?

Source: Time Magazine

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BookExpo, the US industry largest annual trade exhibition ended last month in Los Angeles without a clear strategy to revive the industry.

The book industry which is going through troubling times lacks a clear strategy to move forward, with the advent and popularisation of new technologies like the Kindle and the internet challenging the traditional ways of publishing it is forcing the industry to evolve and adapt to change.

Simon & Schuster CEO and President Carolyn Reidy said about the event: “It was quite, very quite”, in fact the entire even lacked interest in the absence of a “buzz book”. Amazon could have been that “buzz book” or should I say “buzz e-book”, in fact the event lacked such interest that the highlight of the event was a pop concert by Prince.

Amazon was praised throughout the whole event with its Kindle reading device, however since Kindle e-books only account for 6% of total book sales it was hardly exciting anyone, having a bigger stage at BookExpo could have increased e-book exposure as a viable alternative to traditional books and as a way of kick starting the industry back into gear. Perhaps Jeff Bezos could have delivered the keynote address instead of the Prince pop concert.

However popular novelist Ray Bradbury expressed some reservations about e-books saying: “There is no future for e-books because they are not books.”

Should Amazon Kindle have had a prominent position at the BookExpo in LA to promote the use of e-books and e-book readers?

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Princeton University Press has announced that it will start publishing Kindle edition textbook this fall, according to Inside Higher Education, Princeton will follow other prominent educational establishments like Yale, Oxford and UC Berkeley in offering Kindle edition textbooks to students and faculty. Depending on the success, more university are likely to follow.

The Kindle seems like the ideal device which would appeal to the university demographic more so than any other gadget out there, students and faculty can both benefit from the Kindle. Image if every student had a Kindle, all the course lectures and textbooks could be downloaded the instant they were available, with the amount of reading an average student goes through in an average semester they may be grateful for a device which can help them reduce the weight in the already heavy bags. And university lecturers could add reading material for next week lecture which could be automatically downloaded to a students Kindle, just like a newspaper.

With Kindles search feature students can easily find the right passages instead of searching through the library archives for 3 hours, it can be noted, annotated and bookmarked for later reference.

Anything that help with learning and education gets the thumbs up from us

Source: cnet

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We don’t all have a couple of spare hours every day, so if your just interested in what Bazos has says about the Kindle then you can skip most of the interview - Bazos starts talking about the Kindle in part 3 at 3min 25sec into the interview.

Partial Transcript by Wired.com:

Portfolio: Let’s talk about the Kindle. What do you want it to be?

Bezos: Any book, in any language, ever in print should be available in less than 60 seconds. We worked on it for three years. It’s been selling out since being released.

Portfolio: You sold how many?

Bezos: You asked that so innocently, but you know I’m not going to answer. We have a long-standing practice of being very shy about disclosure, and I’ll stick to that practice. The Kindle has substantially exceeded our expectations.

Portfolio: Every effort at e-books has failed. Why should this one work?

Bezos: We decided we were going to improve upon the book. And the first thing we did was try to determine the essential features of a physical book that we needed to replicate. The No. 1 feature is that it disappears. When you’re in the middle of reading, you don’t notice the ink or the glue or the stitching or the paper — all of that disappears, and you’re in the author’s world. Most electronic devices today do not disappear. Some of them are extraordinarily rude. Books get out of the way, and they leave you in that state of mental flow.

Portfolio: How do you improve on that?

You can watch the full interview 6 part interview here.

Source: Wired

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“At Simon & Schuster, we are excited by how many Kindle books we’re selling and the feedback from readers who want to read our titles on their Kindles. We have also learned that readers aren’t just looking for new or bestselling books, but also books that are older or hard to find,” said Carolyn Reidy, President and CEO, Simon & Schuster, Inc. “These are the books that have proven themselves to be of enduring interest, and we want readers to be able to find them anytime, anywhere. We are pleased to take another big step toward that goal by making this great percentage of our active backlist available on Kindle by the end of 2008.”

“Kindle is re-igniting a love of reading — after purchasing a Kindle, customers purchase, on average, just as many physical books, and their total book purchases on Amazon increase by 2.6x. Kindle books are also becoming a meaningful portion of Amazon’s overall book sales much sooner than we anticipated — of the 125,000 books available both as a physical book and on Kindle, Kindle books already account for over 6 percent of units sold,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “This commitment from Simon & Schuster moves us closer to our vision for Kindle, which is to make any book, ever printed, in any language available in less than 60 seconds.”

Simon & Schuster said that it will be doubleing their content available for the Kindle.

One particular sentence in the statement stood out to me;

…after purchasing a Kindle, customers purchase, on average, just as many physical books, and their total book purchases on Amazon increase by 2.6x

2.6 times! I’m sure the executives at Amazon are thrilled with this particular statistic, it could mean that the Kindle has been a profitable ‘experiment’ — as Amazon puts it — from day one. I have no doubt that Simon & Schuster, and other publishers, want to grab a piece of the action now that they are aware of just how many e-books Kindle owners are buying.

Source: Yahoo Finance

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Amazon updated the Kindle product page this morning with a 10% reduction in the price of the Kindle, the price drop is a welcome one and also includes free 2-day shipping. So if you have been waiting for the price to drop before purchasing a Kindle, now is your chance to get one before stocks run out again!

The price drop was expected, as predicted by most analysts, further drops are expected in the future but that all depends on a stable supply of Kindle devices. The reason Kindle has been out of stock so frequently is because a single factory has been manufacturing the Kindles, so far supply has FAR exceeded demand, but just over a month ago Amazon brought on-line a second factory, which should create a more stable supply of Kindle devices.

Amazon is expect to drop the price around 15% a year, so by 2010 the device should be priced at around $300 in line with expectations, meaning I wouldn’t expect another price drop until around Christmas time.

Source: Amazon Kindle Store - Kindle now $359 with free 2-day shipping

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From the F-Origin press release:

The functionality and flexibility in design provided by zTouch is the perfect solution for ebooks and other products that utilize PVI’s ePaper displays. zTouch enables users to control book navigation and numerous management functions, such as turning pages, making selections or simply making edits or comments via touch and through gestures and hand writing recognition. The ease of use and high-functionality of zTouch are an ideal match for eBooks by PVI.

From the separate PVI press release:

When a user touches the display, proprietary software calculates the location and intensity of the touch with input from the sensors. There is no additional layer of materials on top of the display as there is in traditional touch technologies; as such, there is no impact to the reflective qualities of the display. This technology requires no ITO (the most fragile component in traditional touch panels), hence exhibits superior robustness. Unlike capacitive touch panels which requires the touch medium be conductive (such as a finger), this force sensing technology works with either stylus or fingers

You can read the full accompanying press release from PVI’s perspective on their website and you can read up on the zTouch 3.0 Technology [PDF warning] with this product information guide provided by F-Origin.

What does this mean? will the next Kindle offer a touch screen interface as standard? The Kindle isn’t mentioned by name by either PVI or F-Origin in the press releases, but its hard to see this technology not making it onto any future incarnation of the Kindle. These certainly are interesting developments and would strongly suggest that Amazon is working on a Kindle v2.

Source: Teleread

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This is not really news, it’s just note-worthy. US Magazine has snapped Jennifer Aniston with her very own Kindle becoming the the first(?) celebrity to own a Kindle. It has got me thinking what other celebrities do you think own a Kindle? please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Here is a more clearer picture of Jennifer holding her Kindle.

Source: CrunchGear

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Today BookLocker.com has filed an antitrust suit against Amazon.com on behalf of POD (Print On Demand) publishers.

It all started in late March when Amazon contacted a number of US small presses and self-publishers to say that if they didn’t use Amazon’s in house print on demand wing called BookSurge then the “Buy” buttons on the Amazon page for their books will be removed. They could then only sell their books on Amazon through a third party.

You can read the filing via this link. [PDF Document]

We will keep our eye on this as the story develops we’ll let you all know what happens.

Source: TheBookSeller.com via Mobileread Forums

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Read the full statement by Mark Mahaney/Citigroup Investment Research below:

How Is Kindle Doing So Far In The Marketplace?

Our ability to answer this question is very limited. Amazon is the sole retailer of the Kindle and it has disclosed no information about its sales other than to say that it sold out in the first 5 1⁄2 hours. But we have pieced together four different clues to gain a sense of Kindle’s traction.

First, we note that Kindle has consistently been ranked among Amazon’s Bestsellers in its Electronics category. Ahead of the Apple iPod Nano, the Garmin GPS Navigator, and the Canon Powershot Digital Camera.

Second, we note that the Kindle has received a very large number of customer reviews. Per the exhibit below, we note that Kindle has received more customer reviews than any of the other Top 10 Bestselling items in Amazon’s Electronics category – 2,537 reviews as of May 12th – vs. 663 for the Apple iPod Nano 4GB Silver (3G), the #2 Bestseller. This is in part an unfair comparison. Kindle is a new product sold only on Amazon.com, while there are numerous versions of the iPod, and they are sold by numerous retailers. But still, the volume of reviews does indicate material traction for the Kindle.

Third, we see that the quality/tone of the customer reviews the Kindle is receiving is relatively positive. Below we compare the Star Rating Diffusion – 5 Stars vs. 4 Stars vs. 3 Stars etc… – for each of the Top 10 Bestselling Electronics Items on Amazon. What we see is that the Kindle actually receives fewer high scores than the other Bestsellers – 69% of its reviews are 4 or 5 Stars vs. an average of 80% for the other items. And it receives more low scores than the other Bestsellers – 22% of its reviews are 1 or 2 Stars vs. an average of 13% for the other Items. But for a Version 1 of a product “competing” against a several times iterated leading consumer electronics item like the iPod, a 69% Star 4 or 5 rating is relatively positive.

And fourth, we note that the most reviewed Customer Review of Kindle (“Why and how the Kindle changes everything” by Steve “eBook Lover” Gibson) has been reviewed by at least 27,000 people. Specifically, as of May 13th, 26,931 have read Steve Gibson’s review and actually commented on it by pressing the Yes or No button when asked if the review was helpful. And logically, there would be more people who read the review and didn’t bother to vote, although the voting step is hyper-easy. We believe that this helps provide something of a proxy for how many Kindles have likely been sold. We’d peg the number as somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Kindles sold to date.

The numbers look about right to us, what do you guys think?

For Amazon to hit the $750 million in sales figure a few assumption have to be made. The figures are based on the assumption that sales will grow from 189,000 units by the end of 2008 then to 2.2 million units by 2010 and that Amazon will drop the price to about $300.

Source: Silicon Ally Insider

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WOHOO!

I know a lot of you had grown inpatient with Amazon and been waiting for this news for quite a while, so now is your chance to grab a Kindle device before (inevitably, I think) the stocks run out yet again.

Go to the Kindle Store and get you Kindle!

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Steve Jobs does have a history of rubbishing an industry before launching a product, he famously criticised the music and cellphone industries before launching the iPod and iPhone. Apple has confirmed that the iPod Touch is a platform and not a single product, and Intel’s new Atom processor would seem like an ideal chip for a Kindle-like device and certainly Apple’s design department can come up with something which looks better than the Kindle.

Like most discussions on this subject, this article references a comment made by Steve Jobs when the Kindle was announced “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” could this just be another of Steve Jobs diversion tactic - say one thing, and do another?

If Apple does come out with ‘Safari Pad’ we can safely assume that it will be a full-colour device which will sync to Apple’s other services like iTunes, AppleTV and OSX, which means it would offer video and music content, one thing the Kindle has going for it is that its designed for reading and reading alone which might just give it the upper hand when it comes to e-books.

The article ends with an interesting question - Wouldn’t it be ironic if Mr. Jobs could ultimately claim to have saved reading books in the digital age?

Could Apple do to books what the iPod did for music?

Source: Bits Blog - New York Times

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That prompted Schnittman to look at his royalty statements, which he said “stunned” him: He had expected to sell up to 200 Kindle titles in December, but says the real numbers were “an order of magnitude” more than that.

Schnittman says that a buddy from ‘one of the biggest trade publishers in the world’ called him this week and explained to him how well the Kindle formatted eBooks were selling. In light of this news Evan Schnittman went to look at his royalty statements which “stunned” him. Schnittman says he has no idea if these kinds of sales will continue, but says that this has turned him from a digital skeptic into a digital believer and with sales figures like that it’s no wonder he’s a believer now!

With all this success, it raises the bigger question - How many eBooks does Amazon sell each month?

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts.

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

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There are also no reviews on the page so maybe you can be the first? Here is the Product Description:

The Boston Globe is the most widely circulated daily newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts and in the greater New England region. Host to numerous Pulitzer Prizes, The Boston Globe features local, national, and world news, and features columns in news, arts and entertainment, business, sports, travel, life, and real estate. Notable contributors include Ty Burr, Ellen Goodman, Jeff Jacoby, John F. Kerry, Bob Ryan, and Dan Wasserman.

The Kindle Edition of The Boston Globe contains articles found in the print edition, but will not include some images and tables. Also, some features such as the crossword puzzle, box scores and classifieds are not currently available. For your convenience, issues are automatically delivered wirelessly to your Kindle so you can read them each morning.

This brings the number of newspapers available on Kindle to 14. Whilst adding more newspapers is good, and undoubtedly over time we shall see more newspapers producing Kindle versions of their print editions, its seems to me that there are way too many east-coast newspapers, I would like to see some more west-coast papers make it onto Kindle. I would also like to see more foreign papers because they are clearly unrepresented, a dream for me would be the Financial Times which I read religiously. However I suspect we shall have to wait until Kindle’s international release before we see a substantial amount of foreign newspapers.

So head on over to Amazon and start your 14-day free trial, what have you got to lose?

Source: Official Amazon Kindle Blog

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In December, the Kindle was selling for an average price of $864.04, that was more than double the retail price. Predictably, since then thing have changed and this week the Kindle is selling for an average price of $421.33. The most a Kindle was being auctioned for that I could find $600.00, contrast that with the $1500 just a couple of months ago and its seems like Kindle has truly lost x-factor, at least on eBay it has.

So if you don’t like your Kindle it seems as though you can still sell without losing any money. So when Amazon gets more Kindles back in stock, the auction prices should drop a bit more so those of you who don’t own one already might be able to pick up one at a bargain price. That’s assuming Amazon ever gets any back in stock because it seems like forever now that there hasn’t been any in stock, of-course we’ll let you know as soon as Amazon gets them back in stock.

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It’s wonderful too see the variety of ebooks being sold, it’s not surprising to see that Non-fiction ebooks are the favourite amongst Kindle owners at 64,432, followed by fiction at 35,522.

Other popular categories include; Science (18,134), Business & Investing (10,812), Computers & Internet (5,487), Advice & How-to (5,027) and Romance at 5,948 e-books. Curiously the Sports and Travel categories have the least amount of ebooks with 816 and 728 respectively.

Sitting proudly at number 1 is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle which is a bargain at $7.44 reduced from the print list price of $14.

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This brings the total number of newspapers on offer to 13 (unlucky for some, apparently not to Amazon!), the 13 newspapers are;

1. The New York Times
2. The Wall Street Journal
3. The Washington Post
4. Investor’s Business Daily
5. San Francisco Chronicle
6. San Jose Mercury News
7. The Seattle Times
8. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
9. Le Monde
10. The Irish Times
11. Frankfurter Allgemeine
12. Les Echos
13. The Philadelphia Inquirer

I would personally like to see The Finiancial Times and The Los Angeles Times on the list. I really do hope that newspapers jump onto the Kindle, as traditional newspapers continue to lose circulation, Kindle might solve a few problems. Be sure to check out the links and sign up for your 14 days free trail. Which newspapers would you like to see on your Kindle?

Les Echos (Kindle Edition)

Les Echos is France’s preeminent financial daily, and covers all subjects relating to the economy and the business world at large. Available in the French language and organized into two sections of macro and micro economics, Les Echos also features property market developments, industry & technology, financial analysis and share tips, personal finance information, and lifestyle news.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (Kindle Edition)

Whether it’s local headlines, sports scores, arts, business, or travel and leisure information, read The Philadelphia Inquirer to find out what’s happening in the City of Brotherly Love. In addition to local fare, the major world news stories of the day are also featured.

The Kindle Edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer contains most articles found in the print edition, but will not include all images and tables. Also, some features such as the crossword puzzle, box scores and classifieds are not currently available. For your convenience, issues are automatically delivered wirelessly to your Kindle so you can read them each morning.

Thanks to Kindle Reader for the heads up.

Source: Amazon Kindle Newspapers, Kindle Reader

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