Amazon Kindle Touch Getting To Know Manual page 4

10
Kindle Touch For Dummies, Portable Edition
The $40 will include sales tax for those states that include
sales tax on Amazon purchases.
The first Amazon Kindle became
available in 2007, and sold out in
less than six hours. Many users
back-ordered their Kindles and
waited months to receive them.
The following year, when Oprah
Winfrey announced on her television
show that the Kindle was her "new
favorite gadget," sales skyrocketed,
and again, the Kindle went out of
stock. For two years in a row, the
Kindle wasn't available for Christmas
purchases!
In 2009, Jeff Bezos, accompanied
by author Stephen King at the press
conference, announced the second
generation Kindle. Also in 2009, the
Kindle DX — the larger Kindle — and
Kindle applications for the PC, Mac,
and iPhone became available. To the
joy of readers around the globe, an
international version of the Kindle
also came out in the fall of that year.
The third generation Kindle, known
as the Kindle Keyboard, became
available in 2010; it was the first
Kindle offered with Wi-Fi only or 3G +
Wi-Fi. A few months after it was
released, Amazon started offering a
version of the device with the special
offers and sponsored screensavers.
A brief history of the Kindle
family of e-readers
The Kindle had a windfall year
in 2011, with three new devices
announced and released in the span
of two months. The Kindle family now
includes a basic Wi-Fi only model,
priced at $79; the Kindle Touch,
which is the focus of this book; and
the Kindle Fire, an Android tablet that
came out in November.
The Kindle Touch builds on the best
of the past and adds a number of
new innovations — most notably,
the touchscreen. Like other
Kindle readers, the screen uses
e-ink — a technology that uses
actual particles of ink sandwiched
between two layers of polymer to
create the images you see on the
screen. E-ink also allows you to read
in direct sunlight. The size of the
display is 6 inches; overall the size
is 11 percent smaller than the Kindle
Keyboard. The device weighs 7.5 or
7.8 ounces (the 3G model is a tiny
bit heavier). E-book storage is 4GB
(with approximately 3GB available
to the user), which allows a library
of approximately 3,000 e-books and
other content to be maintained on
the device. With minimal use of
wireless, the battery charge can last
up to two months based upon a half-
hour of daily reading time.