The company announced on Tuesday evening that it would soon begin selling a new version of the Kindle that can wirelessly download books both in the United States as well as in more than 100 other countries.
The new Kindle is physically identical to Amazon’s current Kindle...The main difference: it will use the wireless network's of AT&T and its international roaming partners, instead of Amazon’s existing wireless partner for the Kindle, Sprint. Sprint’s network is incompatible with most mobile networks outside of North America.
The new Kindle will cost $279/US and will start shipping on October, 19th. The "U.S. only" Kindle is also in the news as its price is being lowered by $40 to $259.
Mr. Bezos declined to offer specific information about Kindle sales. But he said Kindle titles were now 48 percent of total book sales in instances where Amazon sold both a digital and physical copy of a book. That was up from 35 percent last May, an increase Mr. Bezos called “astonishing.”
According to a report from tech analysis firm Forrester Research published Tuesday, 1.2 million digital readers will be sold in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, bringing the total sales estimate for 2009 to around 3 million devices, fully a million more than Forrester's previous projection. And in 2010, Forrester expects sales to double again to 6 million.
Over 1,000 different rights-holders now have books available in the Kindle Store, including leading publishers Atlantic Books, Bloomsbury, Canongate, Faber and Faber, Hachette, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet, Penguin, Profile Books, Quercus, Simon & Schuster and Wiley.
About 200,000 English-language titles will be available internationally. The Times points out that catalogs of available titles, "will be tailored to the country they purchased the device in." In the U.S., about 350,000 books are currently available for the Kindle.
Among the apparent holdouts: Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, said the company’s “discussions with Amazon about this opportunity are ongoing, productive and private."
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