Kindle - technical definition

A portable e-book device from Amazon.com that provides wireless connectivity to Amazon for e-book downloads as well as Wikipedia and search engines. Using Sprint's EV-DO cellphone network, dubbed WhisperNet, wireless access is free. It also includes a built-in dictionary. Introduced in late 2007 with 88,000 titles in its (slightly modified) Mobipocket e-book format, more than a hundred best sellers were offered. Downloads take a minute.

Weighing 10 ounces, the Kindle uses an electronic ink (e-ink) monochrome display and holds more than 200 books, blogs and newspapers in the Kindle 1, and up to 1,500 in the Kinle 2 (see below). For a fee, newspapers such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are downloaded during the night for morning reading. Also for a small conversion fee, photos and Word documents can be e-mailed to Amazon and downloaded to the Kindle for viewing.

Kindle 2
In February 2009, Amazon debuted a thinner, faster second generation device with 2GB storage, improved navigation buttons and longer battery life. With gray levels boosted from four to 16, the screen is sharper, and users can opt to listen to their content with the built-in text-to-speech. By the time Kindle 2 was introduced, Amazon offered more than 230,000 titles for downloading.

For the iPhone/iTouch Too
A month after Kindle 2 came out, Amazon debuted the Kindle app for the iPhone, allowing Kindle customers to read their e-books on the iPhone at no extra cost. In addition, automatic bookmarks let readers pick up in one format where they stopped reading in the other. See E Ink and Mobipocket.