And so it’s official – the new product line of Kindle eReaders and tablets is now announced and available for pre-order the Amazon.com website. They all ship in November, but Bezos himself recommends pre-ordering now.
10:52AM Fire ships November 15th. “We’re making many millions of these, but I still recommend you pre-order today.”
- from the engadget live-blogging post
As predicted and been talked about almost endlessly since rumors of the new Kindle were heard, Amazon.com and their entire website and supporting infrastructure is now tailored to allow mobile devices (and especially the new Kindle Fire) to take full advantage.
It’s a lot technical details to swallow at once, but rest assured that it boils down to us being able to browse the Amazon.com website on our mobile devices faster and more intuitively.
Furthermore, everything is now ‘in the cloud’. Amazon.com Prime has included movies and TV shows for a year or 2, but now it’s also about music, books, magazines, etc and all tied into the mobile experience.
Bottom line: more ]
(Credit)
While I scoured my reader items for more news on the Amazon.com announcement being greatly anticipated tomorrow (September 28, 2011), I found an article written by Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation and Lying. I can’t do justice to his article by attempting to summarize here, but early in the article he states that “audiences now expect their digital content to be free” and I take special issue with that statement.
The key word in that sentence would be “now”. I don’t necessarily agree that it is a new concept. I think the concept of “we want it free” has straddled many ages. I believe that what is now happening is that with the advent events such as price hikes for previously affordable content (read Netflix), the fall of big names in booksellers like Borders and other digital media providers like Blockbuster, added in with the new self-publishing era, the voices of the free-seekers have become louder.
The advent of the eBook
eBooks have created a larger proliferation of reading [ more ]