In This Issue

• They’re Here, and They’re Gamechangers!  Amazon Announces Four New Kindles at Stunning Prices, Including a $199 Kindle Fire Tablet, a $99 Kindle Touch, and a New $79 Kindle Base Model 
• Links to More Information on the New Kindles
• The Kindle Touch At a Glance
• The Kindle Fire at a Glance
• Kindle Nation Briefs and Bargains – October 1, 2011
• Over 1,100 Free Kindle Books, Sponsored by Sandra Balzo’s UNCOMMON GROUNDS

  

They’re Here, and They’re Gamechangers!

Amazon Announces Four New Kindles at Stunning Prices, Including a $199 Kindle Fire Tablet, a $99 Kindle Touch, and a New $79 Kindle Base Model

By Steve Windwalker

October 1, 2011

Amazon held a press conference in New York Wednesday morning, and Kindle Nation was well represented by correspondent Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles, who provided our readers with a live blog of a truly dazzling event marked by the launch of four brand new Kindles — include the new Kindle Fire tablet — at prices that shocked us all.

One of the recurring themes from Jeff Bezos and other Amazon spokespersons this week has been these new Kindles are high-end products at low-end prices. And just to put a punctuation mark on that value proposition, although I am not going to attempt a direct comparison of the iPad and the Kindle Fire until I have both units in my hands, I will say this: I spent $599 for my 32GB wi-fi only iPad (plus another $100+  on sales tax and accessories), but I just bought all four of the new Kindle models released this week for a grand total of $526. That’s a family of Kindles that will keep my entire household busy feeding their brains.

It will be interesting to see how things develop with regard to usage patterns between the Kindle Fire tablet and the three new Kindles to which Amazon refers as a dedicated readers.  But two things are clear from the start:

• The Fire is going to be a huge success, and it has already taken over the #1 bestseller spot in the entire Amazon Store.  
• The Fire will leverage and be leveraged by every other product sold by Amazon to an unparalleled extent, as witnessed by its placement across the top not only of the website’s front page, which is nothing new for a Kindle device, but across all of Amazon’s main pages for print books, ebooks, music, tv and movies, and apps. 

There’s a lot of information to share with you, but we’re going to try to strip it down and proceed from the simple to the sublime, with links to more information and video for those who want to read more.

In that spirit, let’s begin with a very simple comparison chart for the hardware Kindle models that were unveiled Wednesday: 

COMPARING THE NEW KINDLES  

Oops, here’s a late addition: The Kindle Touch has Text-to-Speech, but the Kindle Fire and the $79 base model Kindle do not.