Three quick Kindle stories courtesy of our sister blog Gadgetell: Office-supply store Staples is going to carry the new line of Kindles. It will have the $79 low-end Kindle with Special Offers available on October 8th, and will add the Kindle Touch ($99 Special Offers and $139 ad-free), Touch 3G, and Fire in November. The Kindle Keyboard with Special Offers will also remain available at its $99 price point. The Amazon Fire will have 100 exclusive digital graphic novels available from DC, including titles such as Watchmen, Superman: Earth One, and Batman: Arkham City that have never been digitally available before. It’s...

Consumer Reports has an interview with Jeff Bezos in which he hints at the possibility of an Amazon Android tablet, coyly advising interested parties to “stay tuned.” He did insist that just because the iPad and other tablets are becoming popular solutions for e-reading, it doesn’t mean that the Kindle and other dedicated devices are on the way out. “We will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device,” he said. “In terms of any other product introductions, I shouldn’t answer.” Bezos noted that whatever Amazon did, it was always...

Amazon video - NOT impartial review Did Amazon tuck away a microphone in the Kindle 3 with the idea of adding a phone option later, not just for possible fun with a voice navigation option? That’s my guess, after having read Andrys Basten’s mention of the “’not currently enabled microphone provided for future use.’” A phone option for the Kindle would be Jeff Bezos’s way to weaken the iPhone’s multi advantage. Yes, maybe just one gizmo to tote after all---the K machine rather than an iPhone. Perhaps you would pay extra for a wireless connection that worked with the phone. Presto! New...

As eagerly as I slammed Amazon for dissing ePub, let me praise it for the fine dictionary and other wrinkles in the just-updated Kindle apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Fittingly, I’m in the middle of reading Losing Mum and Pup, a sprightly memoir by Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. WFB, my political opposite, was a strong supporter of the TeleRead vision of a well-stocked national digital library system. Maybe partly in deference to the father, the son’s  memoir serves up more than its share of Latin and French phrases. Jeff Bezos’s...

OK, gang. Parse this exchange between USA Today reporter Edward C. Baig and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, amid the ballyhoo for the third-generation Kindle: Q: Why doesn't Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries? A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes. Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we're...

USA Today has another interview with Jeff Bezos (they’re popping up all over given today’s launch of the new Kindles) in which he addresses a couple of points some e-book fans have been asking about for a while. Most notably: Q: Why doesn't Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries? A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a...

Although my new day job meant I couldn’t stay up late to watch Jeff Bezos’s guest appearance on Charlie Rose last night, MediaBistro’s EBookNewser has the liveblogged scoop. Some interesting pithy comments from Bezos—he says the number one thing people are doing on the iPad right now is playing video games, while the number one thing people are doing on the Kindle is reading books. And he favorably compares the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle with what some people spend on sunglasses. And Bezos also explains why he doesn’t reveal sales figures: We...

(Spotted by eagle-eyed TeleReader Felix Torres!) First it was the markdowns on the Kindle 2, and the even lower markdowns on refurbished Kindle 2s. This should have been an early clue, given that it’s much the same thing that happened to the Kindle 1 shortly before the Kindle 2 came out. When the Kindle 2 went out of stock on Amazon, it seemed obvious a replacement would be coming soon—and now the Wall Street Journal is covering Jeff Bezos’s next e-ink marvel. Engadget has a closer look at the device (and a bigger version of the...

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

Continuing the trend of examining Amazon’s confusing “growth” numbers, CNet executive editor David Carnoy (who has also received TeleRead coverage concerning his e-book Knife Music) has looked at Amazon’s announcement and is asking some interesting questions for which there are no really good answers. Apart from nobody really knowing what “growth” means, Carnoy wonders about revenues now that Amazon is forced to conform to agency pricing for 5 out of the big 6 publishers. He wonders how many of those “growth” titles are self-published e-books, many of which cost well under $5. Is Amazon gaining or losing e-book...

It's a long and very interesting interview that covers a range of subjects, ebooks included. Here's just a snippet: Fortune: In the past, you've been a big proponent of lower prices for ebooks and an open opponent of the book publisher agency model, which allows the publisher to set the final retail price whether there's an intermediary retailer or not. Now that you've switched to an agency model, will ebookstores like Amazon's get hurt? Bezos: No. First of all, there are a bunch of publishers of all sizes, and they don't all have one opinion. There are as many opinions about...

I am probably an anomaly in the digital age. I do not own any Apple products (except the free version of QuickTime that has been forced on me) and have no plans to acquire any Apple products. I am not particularly impressed by the iPad or the iPod, and see the iPhone as just a money sinkhole. I used to think how great it would be to be able to build a computer to my own specifications and use the MacOS, but that never occurred because Apple doesn’t permit it. Of course, that was also in the days when I believed...