The Canadian site is still showing the old version, with the old price, though.

The price drop and screen improvements sound nice, but this thing still won't let you buy and read non-Amazon books, right? And there's still no touch-screen with stylus-based highlighting and annotation, one of the biggest 'musts' for students and scholars, so I can't see investing in one of these.

Yes you can buy and read non-Amazon books on it if they come from a DRM free source. With tools like Calibre it is trivial to convert pretty much any format into a kindle compatible format and the kindle will read PDF's.

Virtually all the books on my kindle are things i have been able to collect online from amazing resources like feedbooks and manybooks.

Currently touch-screen based eink is undesirable becuase the overlay makes the text hard to read. See the touch based sony ereader reviews. I will admit that your milage may vary with this one.

It handels highlighting and annotations just fine and even backs them up to the could making them easier to search and index. Although this does only happen with titles bought from Amazon, which is a bit of an annoyance.

My wife has the old kindle 2 and she can do all that stuff. It reads PDF documents natively but you can send other doc types to Amazon's service by email and it will either send it to you to upload locally for free or through the 3G connection for a fee per kb.

It doesn't do protected PDF, you have to put them through a (ahem) process to remove the drm. So she can't download PDF books from the library without a python script that fixes them, then a trip to Calibre to turn it to an epub, then amazon's service to become an azw.

Native PDF sucks because it can't do text to speech, change the font size, etc... It won't convert PDF to azw so you must convert to epub first.

I wish they would release a back-lit version.

I've actually been reading books on my iPod using the Kindle software and it's a pretty good experience. At first, the screen seemed small, but now the device pretty much disappears once I start reading and I'm not conscious of it until I get my 20% battery life warning.

"And there's still no touch-screen with stylus-based highlighting and annotation, one of the biggest 'musts' for students and scholars"

I see so many people saying this. When I was in school, I was always as careful as I could be to not leave a mark, scuff, or crease in any of my textbooks so that I could sell them back at the end of the class. I never wrote in my books then, and I don't write in my books now.

Darren,

Once you get over the whole don't write in your books things. Something that was drilled into most of us in elementary school. Books become much more interactive and more of a dialog with ideas, then just a monolog being told to you.

Books are tools: books with writing in them are often more useful tools than books without, for those who care to own them and use them in this way, or who have a professional need to do so. Also, annotations, notes, etc. are part of the further life of a text, a collaborative effort where we write about, against, with, the primary text.

That's a pretty good endorsement, actually. Do you find it awkward to type notes quickly with the Kindle keyboard, though? I'm studying for my comprehensives right now, and need to mark and write pretty quickly. But I'm sick of lugging these paper books everywhere, especially when I travel.

"And there's still no touch-screen with stylus-based highlighting and annotation, one of the biggest 'musts' for students and scholars"

Yeah, the vast most of my reading is non-fiction, and I stick notes and post-its all over the show. I like the idea of being able to do a word search, but I hate the idea of not being able to mark up a book.

"I see so many people saying this. When I was in school, I was always as careful as I could be to not leave a mark, scuff, or crease in any of my textbooks so that I could sell them back at the end of the class. I never wrote in my books then, and I don't write in my books now."

I used to be scrupulous about not marking books, but a fwe years ago I figured, feck it, it's my book, and I'm probably not going to be selling it, so why /not/ mark it up? Also, I kinda like reading books from the library, and discovering what other people thought about a particular passage, or their clarifications or contradictions.

Jon

P.S. and even at $140 ... that's still ~10 'real' books :D

Finally getting into a sane price range. I still prefer paper, mind you.

OK, suppose you had a book that you got 20 years ago. Would you rather have it on paper...or a 3½ inch floppy?

Now think what this format is going to do in 20 years.

Besides, we all know not to buy our books from Amazon, right? I thought so.

Just preordered it. 143 euros including shipping to France is reasonable.
I hope it can be mounted as a normal usb drive, like the Kindle 1, though.

A couple of facts that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the post or comments.

+ The new model with have new Text-to-Speech enabled menus

+ Since the release of Kindle 1, they have had a web browser built into the device. The new version has a new open source browser based on WebKit. It includes a button to remove content surrounding articles like what Safari and Readability from Arc90 offer.

+ More Storage, Up to 3500 books.

+ Quieter Page Turn Buttons

Also, this Quote from Jeff Bezos in the NY Times:

“There will never be a Kindle with a touch screen that inhibits reading. It has to be done in a different way. It can’t be a me-too touch screen,” he said. Earlier this year, Amazon bought Touchco, a start-up specializing in touch-screen technology, but current touch-screen technology adds reflections and glare and makes it hard to shift one’s hands while reading for long periods of time, he said. Color is also “not ready for prime time.”
----Jeff Bezos in NY Times 7/29/2010

This new Kindle is the first version ever able to be shipped to New Zealand. Unfortunately Amazon has lost a lot of their potential market share due to the Kobo being the first commercially available e-reader in NZ. They have been sold out since introduced. Now I have a Kobo, but I may have bought a new Kindle otherwise. The price is NZ220 including shipping for the wifi only version, compared to NZ300 for the Kobo.

Luckily for me, the new Kindle is very close in size to the Kobo and I've been selling handmade Kobo covers like hot cakes since it came out in New Zealand. With only a few mm adjustment to my pattern I will now be able to sell Kobo/Kindle covers :)

The price was never the problem.

Nook runs on Android, touchscreen, many more books available, expandable memory, etc, etc.

It's getting cheap enough now to tempt me, I don't want all the DRM crap though, I'd put Linux on it.

Yeah, unfortunately the new one is now up ... and they're gouging us. They're charging $189, a $50 difference. Currency difference is only $5. I guess they figure hey, they've been able to screw us on books since the CAD and US dollars neared parity, why not try it on electronics, too?

I'm going to use that one on my librarian friends! "Buy books: fewer fluids and spewage."

The $139.00 version doesn't have 3G, just wifi, which for some people is a big deal---it's nice to be on the road and have instant, free access to wikipedia and a bare bones web browser.

In any case, I'm glad to see that Amazon's not trying to bloat the device with silly features like touch screen and color in a misguided attempt to compete with the iPad--instead, they're improving its base functions, and lowering the price. They know their product and their market.

The Kindle is a specialized device for comfortably reading books without eyestrain brought on by backlighting and glare. In that limited scope, it excels, and far surpasses the iPad and other devices that use non-eInk screens.

Precisely. When all your books are belong to them then you couldn't give me one of these things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

It was actually quite tempting (particularly the graphite version) for about the 3 minutes it took to discover they still don't natively support the defacto ebook standard (without converting and the possibility of introducing formatting errors).

Amazon? Listen: ePub or GTFO.

I have an iPad with a Kindle app. It's like you are asking me to trade my color TV for a small B/W TV. When Kindle can surf and have all the gadgets that the iPad has, then I will convert. Price is not a factor. I would rather get a Honda over a Lada.

Does the kindle app on the iPad physically change it into an eInk screen? Is it still backlit? Does it still have glare? Does the app make it smaller and more comfortable to read with one hand like a paperback? Does it magically eliminate the finger grease on all the pages you're trying to read?

When the Kindle can surf (ok, it actually does that now to a limited degree) and has all the gadgets that an iPad has, why would you convert? It would be just another iPad wannabe at that point--the whole purpose of eReaders is to do provide one very specific thing--comfortable reading without eyestrain. Why is that so hard for people to grasp?

Also, annotations, notes, etc. are part of the further life of a text, a collaborative effort where we write about, against, with, the primary text.

I bet you're the one who drew all those penises in my 7th grade algebra book.

Like others, I was skeptical of eink and ereaders, even in the stores, until I got a Sony 505 as a gift and lived with it for a little while. It's awesome. The key is the screen. It actually IS like paper. Specifically, mine is like reading high quality newsprint under a minutely reflective sheet of plastic, which for me is a reasonable, and is better than the experience reading on an LCD.

An eink screen is so much easier to read for an hour or more at a time than any laptop or LCD tablet I've seen, and is more like a paper book, and I say this as someone who actually didn't mind reading ebooks on a Nokia N810 (the key on LCDs is always to reverse the contrast). Because the 505's battery isn't needed until a page turn, it stays charged for weeks, again making it much more like having a real book.

I have my Droid for wiki and other internet access. The only thing the Droid isn't great for is reading large amounts of text in one sitting, so a dedicated e-reader is the perfect complement.

Having bought an iPod Touch recently, I'm starting to see the possible drawbacks of a WiFi-only Kindle. WiFi isn't as ubiquitous as you think. But if your usage pattern involves doing all your shopping at home, and if you really don't want to risk impulse-buying a bunch of crap on the way home, then this might actually be better for you. Better still if you're afraid of your location being both tracked by 3G and associated with your reading list.

The $139 price point makes us forget that the promise of unlimited cellular Internet access is one of the things that made the first-generation Kindle worth its launch price: http://xkcd.com/548/

'Twas indeed I, obeying a early call to my life's work.

I'll get it once they release a case made of rich mahogany