A New Kindle Fire, Just in Time for the Holiday Season - NYTimes.com

The “X” in the Kindle Fire HDX is a reference to the screen’s clarity. It packs in 323 tiny dots per inch, making it sharper than high definition.

If it’s October, that must mean the holiday buying season has begun — and that means Amazon will offer a new color tablet.

It’s the Kindle Fire HDX. It costs $230, and it’s terrific. The battery goes for about 11 hours, or 17 in a power-saving, reading-only mode. The stereo speakers sound great. The plastic case weighs less than the prior version and has narrower margins around the screen. There’s a mediocre camera on the front for video chatting (not on the back on the 7-inch model). The one big misfire was putting the power and volume keys on the back; you’ll spend the first week hitting the Off button by mistake while trying to turn it up the sound. Read more...

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E-book sales decline: Do people not want to read books on tablets?

Why Don't People Want to Read E-books on Tablets?

By Robert Rosenberger

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Posted Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013, at 11:38 AM

Jeff Bezos shows off a new Kindle Fire.
Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages

We’ve been living through an e-book boomtime. Two years ago, Amazon turned heads by announcing that sales of digital books had eclipsed those of hardcovers, and the trend has only continued. But a recent pair of reports shows that a plateau may be coming. The Association of American Publishers claims that this year’s first quarter saw only a 5 percent increase in e-book sales, which is strikingly low compared with previous quarters. Nielsen reports that e-book sales actually fell in April, if only slightly, compared with same period last year. This is significant because it marks the first-ever decline in the market. If the current numbers hold, then e-books will maintain 25 percent of the overall book market.

Nicholas Carr reflects on these data on his Rough Type blog, and he brainstorms a list of potential culprits. His suggestions include the possibility that we’ve run out of readers willing to make the jump from print to e-reading; that readers are no longer purchasing e-books simply for novelty’s sake; and that the e-book format may be proving conducive only to limited kinds of reading, such as travel reading.* Read more...

Amazon Silk—Amazon's Revolutionary Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser

The web browser on Kindle Fire introduces a radical new paradigm -- a "split browser" architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. The result is a faster web browsing experience, and it's available exclusively on Kindle Fire.

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