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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Amazon plans to expand Kindle to new formats and devices

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When Amazon created an iPhone app based on its popular e-reader device, the Kindle, it became clear that $10 books were as big or bigger than $400 readers in Amazon's business model. By allowing reading on other devices, Amazon has been able to make sales to customers who would never have bought a Kindle, and that's worked so well on the iPhone that other devices and book formats are now on the agenda.

According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company looks at the ebook business and the gadget business as separate. Expanding to new devices isn't going to keep gadget-hungry consumers from buying a Kindle if they were planning to do it anyway, and plenty of customers who would never buy a Kindle might still buy a few books for their own devices. As for file formats, the Kindle already reads PDFs, but Bezos said other formats could be supported in the future. This may be one of the results we're seeing from Amazon's acquistion of Stanza, which supported formats that the Kindle doesn't yet.

Updated: At first, I thought that recent release of the Kindle Source Code might have something to do with developing for other platforms, but it was actually only done to comply with the Gnu Public License. Because the Kindle was built on some open-source GPL-licensed components, Amazon had to release the parts of the code that were modifications of those components. It unfortunately has nothing to do with enabling developers on other platforms to build apps that work with Kindle books.

Amazon plans to expand Kindle to new formats and devices originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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