from TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home:

TeleRead Editor’s Note: We are happy to welcome Stephen Windwalker as a regular contributor to TeleRead. Stephen has been writing about Amazon’s strategic innovations since his niche bestseller on online bookselling in 2002, and his Complete Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle was the top-selling title in the Kindle store for 17 weeks in 2008, but on advice from Amazon’s attorneys Windwalker refuses to divulge how many books have been sold. Stephen is also publisher of the Kindle Home Page blog and the weekly Kindle Nation email newsletter. Paul Biba

Far be it from me, just hours before the heralded launch of the Kindle 2.0 (or whatever Amazon plans to call it), to pull back the curtain with wild claims about any of the device’s new features. Tomorrow I’ll do my best to base all of that on the actual news, rather than the rumors, and pack it into tomorrow afternoon’s felicitously timed weekly issue of my Kindle Nation email newsletter.

Tonight seems like a better time to look back at the prospective Kindle 2.0 features that I suggested last summer in The Complete Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle. We could all agree on the obvious fixes demanded by thousands of Kindle owners including, most notably, those pesky next- and previous-page bars and a user-friendly system of content management folders or labels. Other hardware enhancements such as quicker refresh, a touch screen, and a color display will happen when the technologies are ready.

But the more significant questions to be answered at Monday’s press conference may tell us how aggressively Amazon is prepared to pursue the still unrealized revolutionary potential of the Kindle. Without making too much of the fact that these suggestions are discussed in much greater detail in my book, let me here provide the briefest of discussions of a few of the high notes Jeff Bezos could hit in between those signature fits of forced laughter. [Read rest of post]