What does it cost to make a Kindle book?

As we’ve often noted, publishers are not big fans of the Amazon Kindle. Amazon’s strident efforts to keep the standard price of a Kindle Book at $9.99 has ruffled a lot of feathers amongst the big publishers, who are reluctant to do away with the existing print dichotomy, where they get to sell hardcover books at $30 a pop for four months until they release an affordable paperback version of average... [Read more]

Kindle Return Policy Exceeds Expectations

One of the unfortunate truisms of modern consumer electronics is that they rarely, if ever, have a shelf life of more than a few years. Whether this comes about just because of the rough and tumble way that most people treat their expensive toys, or whether it represents a scheme of planned obsolescence on the part of manufacturers, most people hold domain over a veritable graveyard of broken gadgets. We’re... [Read more]

Kindle for Blackberry Extends Amazon’s Mobile Efforts

Being a Kindle aficionado is about more than merely owning a Kindle, whether it’s the Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, or a Kindle Touch that you’ve managed to smuggle back in time. While Amazon’s e-Reader becomes a fast friend and frequent companion for those lucky enough to own one, the experience extends beyond the bounds of the device. There is of course the Kindle for PC application, for which... [Read more]

Amazon to Reward Good Customers with Free Kindles?

Even if you’re as dubious as I am about the new Apple iPad competing seriously with the Kindle for the e-Reader spotlight, there’s little questioning that their share of the market stands to fall off a bit in the coming months and years. The sheer number of new devices available now is bound to dilute their dominance, especially when people start trying to make the apples to oranges comparison... [Read more]

Kindle Touch is Closer Than You Think

Despite the fact that Apple’s iPad has been met with near-universal criticism since it was announced at the end of January, it would seem that Apple has still managed to at least change the dialogue in the e-Reader sphere and cast doubt on the viability of Amazon’s current stable of readers. The iPad might not be able to multitask, or display flash, or have any use at all out in the sun, but it’s... [Read more]

Is Amazon compromising your right to privacy?

It always used to baffle me when people would vehemently oppose the government’s ability to look up records of books you’d taken out at the local library. What could they possibly glean from such mundane information, I worried, and how could reading anything you find at your local library be used to implicate you? It’s not as though they have diagrams on how to build pipe bombs sitting right... [Read more]

Amazon Earnings Report- State of the Kindle Address

What better time of year to address the state of the Kindle than in the wake of the President’s State of the Union address? Amazon recently announced their earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2009, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Is that success sustainable? According to their statements, fourth-quarter profits were up 71 percent over this period last year. While much of that... [Read more]

A Student’s Guide to Kindle Notes & Marks

One of the most underrated features of Amazon’s Kindle is the ability to highlight passages of text to save for later. If you’ve never done it before, just use the five-way joystick up or down when on a given page of a book and click it in at the beginning of your passage, scroll to the end of the text you want, and click it again. You can even type out your own notes and commentary by just tapping... [Read more]

Amazon Enlists Developers for Kindle Games

With the January 27th debut of Apple’s long-rumored tablet PC right around the corner, I think some people are starting to look back at Amazon’s Kindle and wonder… What’s so special about that? It’s just an e-Reader! Of course, for those of us who purchased our Kindles just for the pleasure of reading books, that seems like a nonsensical statement, but it’s a question that’s asked nonetheless. We’ve... [Read more]

Bible Reading on the Kindle Revisited

One of our most popular posts here at KindleChat is an old one we did over two years ago on the state of the Bible on Amazon’s e-Reader. As it turns out, there are loads of people out there who see their Kindle as a way to keep in close contact with scripture on top of their favorite classics and best-sellers. Things have changed for the better since then, so we thought we’d give you a long-overdue... [Read more]