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The Amazon Kindle is an electronic book reader made and sold by Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer and one of the nation’s biggest book sellers. Amazon is one of the iconic companies of the Internet era.

The company made the leap from selling others’ products to selling its own when it introduced the Kindle, a reader with the capability of downloading books wirelessly, in November 2007. A few other companies, notably Sony, had been selling electronic book readers, but Amazon’s approach seemed to create a completely new experience, offering users the chance to buy virtually any book at any time anywhere.

The Kindle uses a display technology called electronic ink that is meant to mimic the experience of reading black letters on white paper. It is easier to read in bright lights and it uses less electricity than the sort of displays used on laptop computers and cellphones.

The device was praised by Oprah Winfrey, on her show in October 2008. Shortly thereafter, Amazon sold out of the first generation of Kindle devices, missing the critical holiday selling season.

A second version of the Kindle, with more memory and longer battery life, was introduced in February 2009 at the same price. A third, large-screen version, optimized to display textbooks and newspapers, was introduced in May 2009.

By that time the Kindle had become the company’s biggest selling product. Amazon built up a 90 percent share of the American e-book market, in part because it sells most new releases and best sellers at a heavily discounted standard price of $9.99. Many Kindle owners have said the low price motivates them to buy more e-books, but publishers feared that the price would eventually erode their profits.

The Kindle’s success also brought a string of competitors into the market it had established, most notably the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer with a high-contrast color screen, Web browser, games, applications and computing capabilities.

July 19, 2010 was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future. Amazon announced that during the previous three months, sales of books for the Kindle had for the first time outnumbered sales of hardcover books. In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The online version of the New York Times has dedicated an entire section of their website to the Kindle reading device. Read more…