COVERITLIVE.COM

10:03

We're here at the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Ave. The press conference is starting a little bit late...

10:09

Okay, they're about to start.

10:21

Wireless is extremely unstable:

"Today I'm excited to announce Kindle 2." thin, light, weighs only 10.2 ounces (.1 less), .36 inches thick. iPhone is .48. Kindle is 25% thinner. A big engineering challenge.

Easy to hold. "Page-turning buttons flex inward. We added a five-way controller to improve navigation. Easy to use one-handed.

16 shades of gray vs. 4 in new e-ink. Crisper photos and text, page turns are 20 percent faster. Battery life is 25 percent longer. You can read for 2 weeks on a single charge.

10:21

Bezos onstage. I finally have Wi-Fi access again.

10:21

Free 3G wireless delivery in less than 6 seconds.

10:22

New feature: WhisperSync syncs up with Kindle 1, Kindle 2, and in the future, other mobile devices.

10:22

Here's what he said before, in summary: Long-form reading is losing ground to short-form reading. We read blog posts, emails, etc.

Books haven't changed in 500 years – Gutenberg would still recognize it

20 years ago: Revolution begins with connected devices, computers. He's convinced mobile e-mail makes him more productive, loves e-mail and blogs, but we learn different things from long-form than short-form reading. Some things can only be taught or understood in hundreds of pages.

10:22

10 percent of Amazon's sales are now on the Kindle, too.

10:22

Now he's demonstrating a New York Times view.

10:23

"This is a really dramatic improvement in newspaper navigation."

10:23

Headline, first few paragraphs now visible above the jump.

10:25

Five-way controller now getting demonstrated, showing Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." If you want to look up a word in the book, "chary." 250K word dictionary accessible on Kindle.

10:25

Or, rather, he's looking up the word "chary."

10:26

Using one of the buttons on the five-button navigator, he looks up the words, says it means "cautious." "Maybe one day I'll have a better vocabulary," Bezos jokes.

10:26

New feature getting demonstrated with Gettysburg Address.

10:26

"One of the things that you can do with Kindle 2 is you can have it read to you." Text-to-speech built in.

10:27

Can read out loud to you if you're commuting, busy, etc.

10:27

Demonstrating the audio. Text-to-speech is still clearly text-to-speech, but a big improvement over the famous old Mac text-to-speech.

10:27

"Keeps page as it reads so it's easy to go back and forth between reading and listening."

10:28

Bezos now showing interviews of Kindle 1 customers given Kindle 2.

Page 1 Next >