Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon continues its electronic march across the e-book world with Kindle for Android, which joins Kindle apps for iOS, BlackBerry, Mac and PC.

Like the other Kindle flavors, the Android version will keep your reading organized and synchronized across all your devices via Whispersync, let you make and view annotations and buy titles from the Kindle store. Also like the other version, the Android Kindle app is free to download (find it in the Android Market). What you don’t yet get are the audio and video extras announced for iOS devices yesterday.

The actual hardware Kindle certainly kick-started the mainstream e-book market, but it looks more and more like that was its main reason for existing. Amazon, as we know, makes its money on selling books, not selling Kindles, and the relentless push to make its e-book library available anywhere shows the business plan clearly. It doesn’t hurt that the Kindle’s catalog stands at around 600,000 titles, making it the one of the best-stocked stores around. Kindle for Android will work on any device running Android 1.6 or better.

Kindle for Android [Amazon. Thanks, Kinley!]

See Also:

• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• First Look: Kindle for Mac
• Kindle for Android 'Coming Soon'
• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle

Amazon has added audio and video to its iPhone and iPad Kindle applications. Several titles are already in the store and give you popover additions to the words and pictures already in the e-books.

The new multimedia books get their own section: Kindle Editions with Audio-Video, which is rather sparsely populated right now. The international store contains just seven books, most of which are Rick Steves’ travel guides (plus a cookbook and Knitting for Dummies), while Technologizer reports that the US store currently lists 13 titles. Presumably more are on the way.

This marks a big leap over Apple’s own e-reader software, iBooks, which currently has just words and pictures. IBooks may have a nicer UI, but Kindle has the catalog, and often the lower prices: these new books come in at $13.79 in the international store, and at the regular $10 price-point in the US.

Of course, these versions won’t work on the Kindle hardware: even if they did they’d max out the 2GB storage pretty fast. As it is, these big files are only downloadable over Wi-Fi on the iOS devices.

Cookbooks, travel guides and how-to titles all clearly benefit from added video and audio. Let’s just hope that Amazon doesn’t decide to bulk up simple novels with these extra Megabytes, too, unless it is to add a fully synced audiobook version so you can switch back and forth between words and speech. That would be pretty sweet.

Kindle Editions with Audio-Video [Amazon via Technologizer]

Press release [Amazon]

In the wake of price drops on the Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle, Borders announced Tuesday that it would bundle its Kobo e-reader with a $20 Borders gift card.

The Kobo is priced at $149.99, while the smaller Libre eBook Reader Pro sells for $119.

Borders’ shoppers normally get $5 in “Borders Bucks” after spending $150. With this promotion, people who buy a Kobo will also get $10 in Borders Bucks in addition to the $20 gift card.

The company also released an app for the iPhone and iPad that will allow Kobo users to purchase eBooks content. To promote the release, users who show their Borders eBooks app on the iPhone or iPad will get a free coffee at Borders’ Seattle’s Best Coffee cafes for a limited time. The app is available on Borders.com.

Borders released an Android eBooks app on Monday.

The e-reader price wars is on. Amazon has cut the price of its Kindle e-book reader to $190 from $260 earlier. Amazon’s move comes in response to Barnes & Noble’s price cut on the Nook earlier Monday.

The Kindle will still be slightly more expensive than the basic version of the Nook. A Wi-Fi only version of the Nook is now available for $150, while a 3G model will cost $200.

With the latest round of price wars, the distinction between e-readers and tablets is also becoming clear. Tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist by targeting different groups of consumers based on their purchasing power, the extent of interactivity they need and their reading patterns.

That means two sets of products: Tablets with color displays and lots of features that cost $400 or more, and inexpensive black-and-white E Ink-powered e-readers that will soon be available for $150 or less.

Despite the launch of tablets such as Apple’s iPad, e-book readers continue to be popular among consumers. About seven million e-readers will be sold this year, estimates Forrester. A recent poll by consumer electronics search website Retrevo showed 45 percent of casual readers–those who read one book every few months–say they plan to buy an iPad now instead of an e-reader. But among avid readers–those who read more than five books a month–only 14 percent say they will go for an iPad over an e-reader.

“In other words Apple will still attract many e-reader buyers but Kindle owners might buy more books,” says Retrevo in its blog post. The web site polled 1000 people through an independent panel.

That’s good news for Amazon and Barnes & Noble who are betting on sales of more digital books. E-readers such as Kindle and Nook will help them in that goal.

See Also:

• $150 Kobo eReader: The Real Kindle Killer?
• Acer Debuts New E-Reader, Android Phone
• Why E-Books Look So Ugly

Photo: Amazon’s first generation Kindle (Brian Vallelunga/Flickr)

Oh, snap! Merely hours after Barnes & Noble came out swinging with a $149 WiFi-only version of its Nook and a price-reduced $199 3G Nook, along comes Amazon to rip a massive hole in B&N’s billowing sails. As of this very moment, the $259 Kindle 2 — complete with global 3G and the 6-ink E Ink display you’ve come to know and love (or hate) — is now the $189 Kindle 2. Oh, and there’s also free 2-day shipping. Looks like the undercutter just got undercut, huh?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Amazon’s Kindle conveniently falls to $189, Nook looks stunned and bitter originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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