In October 2001, French duo Daft Punk released the song called ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’. If you’re wondering what this has to do with technology, it’s simple. In roughly the same period of the year, Amazon, most likely inspired by Daft Punk will start shipping their latest Kindle, the third generation e-reader that’s said to be ‘smaller, lighter, faster’. The new Kindle will start shipping on Friday but the retailer has announced that orders placed today will definitely ship 
after September the 17th, so some users may have to hold on for a while until they get to read e-books on their new Kindle.
There will be two versions of the new Kindle, one with 3G and one without. The WiFI and 3G model will have a price tag of $189, as displayed on Amazon.com while the 3G-less Kindle will sport a considerably smaller price tag of $139. At this time both models are sold out, because it looks like people are really into the smaller and lighter form factor Amazon’s e-reader offers. The new e-reader, also known to some as the Kindle 3 has been announced since July 28. Still, it was barely available on the market for a couple of days until Amazon discovered it hadn’t built up enough stock for such a high demand. While Amazon didn’t mention how many Kindles it sold ever since the device’s release but the company did mention that the Kindle was the best-selling item on the site for the last two years. I’m also pretty curious what the top selling item was, but Amazon didn’t reveal that either.
As mentioned above, the best thing about the new Kindle is its reduced size and weight. Both versions weight 8.7 ounces which is about 15 percent less than the previous version of the Kindle. The new versions also have 20 percent faster page turns. The storage offered is 4GB which roughly translates into 3,500 books, more than enough for even the most avid reader. In fact, with so much storage capacity, you might even forget what books you have on the device. 4GB worth of storage space also means that the new Kindle offers double the storage previous models used to offer. The only common point between the old and new e-readers from Amazon is the 6 inch diagonal screen, which you could say is optimal for reading.
A while back I was rather skeptical when it came to e-readers and books in general. In the era of Internet, Facebook and Twitter, when we have fast food and fast cars and we optimize our time to the maximum, the only place in which I actually saw books and reading taking place is on public transportation where you have to kill time while commuting. With the release of the e-reader, users discovered that they could blend education as well as reading as a hobby with technology and books suddenly became attractive again. I guess this is why the Kindle is now selling like hot cakes. This might also be one of the reasons why the iPad is selling massively as well. On Apple’s device you get e-reading and web browsing. In any case, hopefully Amazon took some time to analyze the demand on the new Kindle and stocked up properly. It will be interesting to see whether the Kindle 3 will become out of stock yet again. If it won’t, I’m looking forward to next year to discover just how many new Kindles found a new owner.
