Amazon: No New Kindle This Year; 'Sometime Next Year Earliest'
This story was written by Staci D. Kramer.
What a buzz kill ... Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) spokesman Craig Berman tells the NYT: "Don't believe everything you read. ... There's a lot of rumor and speculation about the Kindle. One thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be no new version of the Kindle this year. A new version is possible sometime next year at the earliest." He didn't fuel any of the other fires, like the textbook version that's the subject of so much speculation these days or the sleeker model predicted for months to arrive this fall.
As a Kindle reader, I hope this doesn't mean Amazon won't upgrade the current model. Nearly a year in, it could use a major update with fixes that don't require a new chassis. For instance, users who purchase after reading a sample have to go back to home base, open the book again and click forward to where they left off. That shouldn't require a new form factor to resolve. The last update was in February.
By Staci D. Kramer