Amazon is upgrading its Kindle e-book reading device to give it access to social networking via Twitter and Facebook.
The enhancements, which also include a feature that lets Kindle users sort their digital books and documents into collections and lock the device with a password, are coming as part of a wireless software update. Also included: larger font options and PDF zooming.
The updates are significant for Kindle users, but unlikely to help the online retailer Amazon.com pose a significant challenge to Apple’s behemoth iPad, which arrived on the scene this spring to challenge the once barely rivaled Amazon in the realm of electronic books.
Amazon, intent on keeping prices down as an advantage against its monochrome Kindle’s more colorful competitors in a growing market field, wanted to stick with $9.99 in an effort to keep its loyal customers, and hopefully attract more of them.
The online retailer certainly needs to do something. The debut of the iPad — and the announcement that Apple would sell e-books itself with a pricing model that suited the major publishing houses — sucked all the air out of the room, and gave publishers the leverage they needed to prevail in a high-profile corporate dispute with Amazon over the prices of best-selling titles.
Before the iPad was even named, the Kindle was having a rough time of it. Amazon is about to roll out a blind-friendly version of the Kindle this summer — but only after lawsuits from sight-impaired college students who claimed its use as a textbook platform discriminated against them. But the problems don’t end there. In the fall of 2009, the online retailer had to offer free books to Kindle customers and defend its integrity after it reached right into their digital libraries and yanked back books that customers had purchased in good faith. Seems Amazon sold digital versions of George Orwell’s novels “1984″ and “Animal Farm” that weren’t authorized to be sold in the United States, though they were in the public domain elsewhere in the world.
The move caused a firestorm of indignation and comparisons to Orwell’s dystopian future as seen in “1984,” where thought police repress the masses and limit access to information and other freedoms. It even sparked a lawsuit by a high school student who said he lost notes he had made on the Kindle for a school assignment.
