E-books

Once the right reader appears, ebooks are going to take off. Will this be it?

clipped from news.yahoo.com Amazon sells own gadget to boost e-books Monday's long-anticipated announcement comes as e-books remain a sliver of overall book sales, partly because they lack the comfort and intimacy of bound paper. Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said the online retailer spent three years developing the Kindle reader, which the company is selling online for $399. Rather than try to "outbook" the bound book, Bezos said, Amazon designed Kindle with the e-book's strengths in mind. It is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 10.3 ounces. Yet it can hold some 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary. Readers can buy and download books directly to the Kindle — without a PC — through Sprint Nextel Corp.'s high-speed EV-DO cellular network without fees or contract commitments. They also can take notes on what they read and store them on Amazon's servers.