Amazon's Sequel to a Best-Selling Thriller

Amazon's new Kindle electronic book reader offers far more storage than the original, unveiled in 2007. (By Jin Lee -- Bloomberg News)

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By Rob Pegoraro

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

There's a new Kindle, but chances are you still can't get one.

Amazon yesterday unveiled the successor to its much-buzzed about, hard-to-find and seldom seen electronic-book reader it debuted in November 2007. The Seattle online retailer says this wireless-connected tablet, which has been on back order since the Christmas season, features a wide variety of upgrades over Kindle 1.0:

· It's thinner. At .36 inches thick, it's about a pencil's width.

· The screen displays 16 shades of gray and, Amazon says, flips from page to page 20 percent faster.

· The battery should last 25 percent longer.

· It offers far more storage, with 1.4 gigabytes available vs. just 180 megabytes on the first Kindle.

· It includes a five-way controller that directly selects items on the screen (on the first Kindle, you have to roll a jog-dial switch to move an indicator up or down in a thermometer-like column to the right of the screen).

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