Amazon has released its groundbreaking wireless book-vending product Kindle in the US.
The "electronic book" is as large a typical softback, but considerably thinner and weighing in at just ten ounces. The device has a large crystal display that mimics the surface of a page and is reportedly as easy to read in bright sunlight as indoors.
On sale for $399, the Kindle allows users to download books of their choice from the online retailer's website, via a wireless 3G network. Owners are not billed for their internet access, because Amazon hopes that customers will purchase enough virtual tomes to justify the overheads.
"Why are books the last bastion of analogue?" asked Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos at the New York unveiling, noting the burgeoning music and movies download industries.
"The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?
"It has to disappear," he continued. "Customers think that electronic books should be less expensive than physical books and we've done that."
Despite being hailed as a reinvention of the way we read and a pioneering ecommerce tool, technology experts don't expect the device to capture a substantial slice of the thriving international book market.
Kindle owners can store up to 200 books on the device's internal memory and spend up to 30 hours at a time reading them, using its rechargable battery. Amazon made almost 90,000 titles available on launch, costing around $10 each.
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