Not quite sure e-readers are for you? They are a significant expense after all, and not everyone is ready to leave those delicious smelling pages behind. But you're in luck if you live near Bexar County in Texas. They're about to open the nation's first bookless public library system.

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Holiday sales figures are in, and not surprisingly tablets and eReaders were popular gifts this year. Amazon is reporting that Cyber Monday was the best-ever sales day for their Kindle line. A new Pew Research poll shows more people are reading books electronically than ever before, and fewer people are reading physical books now than last year. People reading books electronically doesn't mean printed books are dead. Kindles don't come with the stipulation that, if you own one, you have to burn all your books and vow to never buy one again. You can have both, and, if you're an avid reader, you probably should.

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Amazon doesn't seem content to wait until next week to start with the holiday offers. It just released the Wi-Fi enable version of its new Kindle Fire HD five days ahead of schedule. That means that holiday shopping season is officially upon us, and even a little faster than usual. At this rate, we'll all be doing our shopping for next Christmas by sometime around President's Day, and will probably just skip the other holidays altogether.

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My household recently signed up for Amazon Prime (mostly for The West Wing) and have been exceedingly happy with it. Not only does their streaming service offer shows Netflix doesn't, the free two-day shipping came in handy while ordering last minute cosplay items for New York Comic Con this year. It seems they've decided to try a new tactic to gain customers. Much like Netflix and Hulu, Amazon will now offer a $7.99 monthly option which includes everything the $79 yearly subscription does. Sound good? Maybe, maybe not. That comes out to $95.88 a year. 

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Digital rights management, often referred to as simply DRM, is the all-encompassing term used for just about anything that's meant to combat online piracy. Part of the greater DRM schema is the current business model that most digital distribution sales actually only license out their content. This can lead to some odd situations. For example, Amazon recently wiped a woman's Kindle and closed her account, because the company had determined her account was "directly related" to an account that had been closed by the online retailer before. When asked to clarify, Amazon merely reiterated their stance.

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Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite, the newest version of their dedicated E-reader, doesn't seem like it would be incredibly popular with the reverse-engineering, hardware-hacker set: It's black and white, and really one designed with purpose in mind... reading. Then again, maybe that's exactly why someone decided to jailbreak it, opening up to world for adventurous Kindle-users to new and exciting features like... weather widgets, and other stuff you could've done if you had gotten a fully-functional tablet instead.

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In case you've been waiting for J.K. Rowling's newest offering, called The Casual Vacancy, and were looking forward to reading it on your fancy Kindle, it's probably time to start reining in your expectations. The book is seriously, literally, unreadable. Due to a formatting error, the book essentially has two font settings: Minuscule, and huge. Even better? Due to a legal loophole, the eBook still retails for $17.99, and Kindle users can't even read it.

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The eBook pricing dispute between Amazon and pretty much every other provider has had some nasty repercussions. In general, though, the traditional brick and mortar businesses aren't a big fan of the way Amazon operates, with promotions where they specifically suggest folks shop in stores and then buy from their online portal instead. Wal-Mart has now made the call to stop stocking Amazon's Kindle tablet.

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Amazon's big press conference has wrapped and before you ask, nope, we did not get an Amazon phone. We did get several new Kindle options, including the Paperwhite, which could be the new weapon of choice for users interested in a pure, stripped down, e-reader. Keep reading for specs and impressions on what Amazon is bringing to the tablet party this time around.

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There is no doubt in anyone's mind that after the stupendously successful launch of the Kindle Fire last year -- and the amazing surge in tablet use that followed -- that Amazon will be trotting out new hardware soon. In fact, some reporters have even touched prototype devices. However, the number of new devices has just doubled from previous reports. This could be a big year for Amazon.

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There's been a lot of rumblings from Amazon's hardware department as of late. We've been looking forward to new Kindles from the company sometime this year, but now a new report says that we might get a lot more: Amazon phones.

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The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, U.K. today began offering their guests Kindles in place of the bibles you usually see in the drawer of your nightstand. The Kindle will come with a pre-downloaded copy of the Bible for guests to peruse at their leisure. However, I doubt that the hotel management will be as inviting as the Gideons are for guests to take this bible home.

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Reporters have held Amazon's forthcoming illuminated E Ink Kindle in their hands, and rumors about three new devices being unveiled this year have been floating around for weeks. Now a new report says that we can look forward to seeing those new products beginning this July when Amazon is rumored to unveil the first of its new reading devices. The sooner we can put an end to doofy Kindle booklights, the better.

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For a long time, Harry Potter fans were wondering when J.K. Rowling's novels about the boy wizard would make their way to e-readers. Turns out, she was holding out for something extra special - Pottermore. Although you can download the series onto Sony Reader, Kindle, the Nook, and Google Play, and the retailers get a cut of the sales, the power still resides with Pottermore. Until now. Rowling has struck a deal with Amazon to offer all of the Harry Potter books through their lending library. 

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When the Department of Justice announcing an investigation and subsequent suit against Apple and five other eBook publishers for price fixing, Amazon, the 1k pound gorilla of the eBook market and the biggest eBook publisher not named in the suit, immediately lowered its eBook pricing, by as much as a third in some cases. See, the way it works is, Amazon is using the market dominance of its Kindle (60% of the eReader market) to set prices lower than many publishers consider profitable, in an effort to collect even more of the market. Apple, alternatively, takes 30% of any eBook sales on iBooks, and requires any publisher they work with to never sell an eBook for less than the price they sell for iBooks. Are both attempts to create prices based on something other than immediate, per-book profitability? Yes. Are both of them at odds with each other and bad for physical book sellers? Yup. Today, however, saw one of the weirder ways this fight is playing out, namely in the removal of all Amazon brand hardware from their stores.

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As we know (and kinda love), Suzanne Collins has become the best-selling author on Kindle for The Hunger Games trilogy. However, one of the e-reader's features, the ability to highlight a notable passage, has also been overtaken by the widely read young adult series. Amazon has posted a list of Kindle's all-time most highlighted passages, and eight out of 10 of them come from The Hunger Games. So, it's official: readers of The Hunger Games really like the words in The Hunger Games!

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Despite the rumors that Amazon is going to launch three new tablet devices, the gargantuan retailer is apparently not ready to abandon the ultra-readable E ink display format for their Kindle eBook readers. TechCrunch has apparently been allowed to sit down with Amazon's next generation E ink Kindle and reports that it will feature a long-awaited feature: Backlighting. The new device is apparently set to roll out sometime this year, and could bring an entirely new face to E ink readers as well as the end of reading lights for digital devices like the one pictured above.

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