Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said that his company is about to debut a new version of the Kindle e-book reader.
In a message on his Twitter account, Bezos said details of an “all-new, top of the line Kindle” would be unveiled soon.
It would be the eighth generation of a product that helped launch a massive market for electronic books in the past decade. Bezos said the new Kindle would be a high-end product.
The move comes as e-book sales have stagnated for major publishers, a phenomenon experts blame on both the maturation of the market as most people who would have acquired e-reading devices already have them, and higher prices charged for digital books.
These higher prices have been the result of a new wave of contracts between the big New York publishers and Amazon. The contracts let the publishers set the price at which their books will be sold and limit Amazon’s ability to discount.
Nevertheless, the number of titles and revenues generated by independent publishers keeps growing, thanks in large part to the Kindle Store.
Amazon’s Kindle devices occupy an interesting place among the company’s hardware line-up.
It’s a machine specifically dedicated to reading. Abilities typically offered in other portable electronic devices (Internet browsers and apps, for example) are either absent or subordinated.
But it’s certainly not the only way people can access the Kindle Store: lots of readers use the Kindle app on their tablets and smartphones to read digital books.
But it appears that the Kindle remains close to the heart of Amazon’s founder, given the top billing it received on Bezos’ own Twitter account.
About the Author
