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This blog is dedicated to the topics of Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education. it is intended as an information source for the college store industry, or anyone interested in how course materials are changing. Suggestions for discussion topics or news stories are welcome.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

Amazon and the Kindle Vision

At the press conference last week, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon noted that the vision for Amazon was to allow customers to get any book ever printed in under 60 seconds. To support that vision, this week Amazon released a new version of its Kindle app for the iPhone in its continued effort to capture more of the e-book market. According to a posting on the Bits blog, the new app is optimized for the iPhone and more user-friendly. The first generation app required users to open Safari Web separately to buy the book while the new app lets users click once within the app to initiate the purchase. The posting also features interesting commentary from Bezos, which gives some further insight into the direction that Amazon is heading and suggests that Amazon is more concerned with selling the content than they are with selling the devices.
“We are committed to making Kindle books available on a vast array of devices. Whether you own a Kindle or not, we want you to buy Kindle books from us. With the Kindle device, we succeed in business only on the merits of how good the device is. If we can build the best reading device, then that is how we will succeed.

“But if you like to read books on the iPhone we want to support that too. We want to see Kindle books read anywhere. We have high standards, making sure Whispersync works. It is the seamlessness of what we are trying to achieve that we don’t want to jeopardize. Those are the things we want to do, and we will roll out Kindle applications as broadly as we can.”