Amazon Offers $139 Wireless Kindle

[HardOCP News]

It looks like Amazon is rolling out a new $139 wireless Kindle. Aside from the smaller design and lower price, the new Kindle will also feature the company’s new e-ink technology.

Amazon on Thursday also introduced the third generation of the original Kindle, which has Wi-Fi and 3G wireless technologies. The latter makes it possible to buy digital books from Amazon and download them in less than a minute. Amazon kept the price for the device at $189.

 

[Powerage]

Wow! Something I might actually buy as long as I can put my own e-books on there without worrying about *having* to have amazon ones. Possibly very small, though?

 

[Loki008]

Wow! Something I might actually buy as long as I can put my own e-books on there without worrying about *having* to have amazon ones. Possibly very small, though?

There are hacks to get around it, but if you really want that, look into the wifi only nook, it supports everything except the amazon store locked books.

 

[spankus]

actually, there's no hacks involved.

There's even a really robust open source option for windows, mac, and linux http://calibre-ebook.com/

If you're into scifi, baen publishing has a free library

 

[DanNeely]

Baen also has a decent amount of fantasy books, if perhaps only a quarter of their SF.

 

[westrock2000]

Are used ebooks considered violating DMCA?

 

[radioactivez0r]

They really wanted to get the iPad mentioned as much as possible, eh? I'm just not sold yet on an e-reader, maybe if they hit the magical sub-$100 point and I can use the library pretty well for e-books...maybe.

 

[Main Target]

I am completely impressed that the 3g model has free 3g. How cool is that?

 

[DanNeely]

the reason it's free is that the BW used to download a book is tiny and amazon just factors it into the price they charge. Kindle does have a web browser; but the lack of color and very slow refreshrate of the eInk screen preclude doing anything BW intensive over it.

In the hypothetical event of a hacked firmware that lets it be used as a wifi-hotspot I'd expect a reaction ranging from a very low BW cap for non-amazon.com traffic (perhaps with an option to buy a larger quota) to disabling it from being able access anything except amazon.com. Enforcement would neccesarily be done on ATT's end via locking it out based on the SIM.