Details on Kindle 2.0 Leaked?

Boy Genius has the details:

Looks like those Kindle 2 photos we published back in October were spot on. Additional official-looking photos of the Kindle 2 have emerged and the new e-reader from Amazon looks sweet! If the pencil comparison is accurate, then the new Kindle appears to shed much of its width, coming in as thin as the Sony PRS-505 reader, and little bit longer than both the original Kindle and the Sony Reader. As we reported earlier, the Kindle 2 also appears to have a metal back with built-in speakers. Start putting those pennies aside as the Kindle 2 is expected to hit Amazon on the 24th of February for $359, the same price as the current Kindle. No apparent price increase, yay! This is still all unconfirmed but the information seems to jive with previous rumors and the source of the leak, MobileRead, is well-known in the e-book world. We will all get the skinny on this reader and its features on Monday, until then enjoy the photos after the jump.

See more photos here.

While I still like the look of the Sony a bit better, I like the capabilities of the Kindle much, much more. (Particularly being able to buy books over the airwaves.) Slimming down the Kindle and reducing the button sizes brings it a little closer to the Sony in terms of design. While I wish it looked a little different, I will be sorely tempted to buy one of these if this is, in fact, the new design.

Kindle Books on Cellphones?

Looks like the eBook wars are ratcheting up a notch:

It seems I missed this rather important piece of news that the NY Times just published -

Also Thursday, Amazon said that it was working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones. The company… did not say when Kindle titles would be available on mobile phones.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon.

This is hugely important as it means we’re just

1. A step away from having all manner of cellphone eReaders start offering Kindle Store Books.
2. A few steps away from having an eReader for netbooks that couples with Amazon’s Kindle Book Store.

My suspicion is that Amazon might start off with their own eReader - however, at some point of time they would want to open it up to all the different eReading softwares that are available, and more importantly, already popular.

The biggest thing it does is it turns a potential Apple Vs Amazon Kindle battle into a Apple Vs Kindle+Netbooks+cellphones battle. Very cool strategic move by Amazon.

Technologically speaking, it ought to be a piece of cake for Amazon to develop software that would allow you to read all of your Kindle books on your PC as well. Amazon could really position themselves strongly by focusing on being a content provider for eBooks, allowing you access to your entire digital library on your Kindle (or other eBook reader?), you cell phone, and your PC.

This could be very big news indeed.

P.S. -- Kevin Tofel has more thoughts. Here are some reasons why smartphones may be Kindle killers. (I'm not totally convinced. If I'm reading long books, I'd much prefer ePaper to a smartphone screen.) And why targeting cellphones is so important for eBooks. (Short answer -- 4 billion (!) subscribers around the world. That's approximately equivalent to two-thirds of the earth's population!)

The Daily Dozen

1. $200 laptops break a business model.
2. Manage your money online with these services.
3. Hacked construction signs warn of zombie attack.
4. Is an Apple Store coming to Georgetown?
   
5. Carbon nanotubes could replace expensive platinum catalysts and help finally make fuel cells economical.
   
6. Google officialy starts the Google-Amazon book war and the importance of Kindle 3.0.
7. More on the 1.5 million books Google just added to the iPhone. Hopefully, this will work on the Palm Pre too.
   
8. Does traffic trigger lightning?
9. Poll ranks most and least religious states in the U.S.
10. The evolution of the American household.
11. Chimps are born politicians. I guess it works the other way around too?
12. Is the new Kindle going to cost $399? At that price, there better be some pretty good improvements. You can buy a fully functional laptop (netbook) for less than that these days.
    

hahaha

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The Recipe for Recovery is Revealed

Unfortunately, it's not even half-baked:

The Obama administration has apparently revealed its recipe for economic recovery. Based on the rhetoric and policy proposals fronted thus far, the recipe appears as follows:

1. Do everything possible to discourage potential high-value executives from working in troubled industries by capping executive pay in struggling industries.
2. Eliminate high-powered market-based incentives for mid-level employees to perform their jobs well.
3. Encourage distressed companies to renege on long-term contracts that populist politicians find offensive (or consider easy to target so as to appear they are being responsible with taxpayers’ money).
4. Dole out a trillion dollars of taxpayer funds to pet projects and interest groups in the name of “economic stimulus” (enabled by the perception of “responsibility” created by their railing against the targets of #1-3).
5. Ignore the economic consequences of the incentives created (or destroyed) in #1-3 as well as the fact that someone at some point will have to pay that trillion dollar bill.
6. Half-bake under the heat of political pressure and serve to the masses who are starved for quick-fix solutions that only impose costs on “that other guy” or “the rich fat-cats of corporate America.”

I don’t know about you, but I think it will be interesting to see how quickly the soufflé crashes . . . though I’m not looking forward to it being force-fed.

Indeed.

The Daily Dozen

1. Did the stimulus bill just fail? Sort of -- and that's a good thing!
   
2. Managing energy with swarm logic. Self-organizing equipment could cut energy bills.
   
3. Amazon launches a new site specifically for netbooks.
4. Economist Angus Deaton's vision for develoopment economics: "The wholesale abandonment in American graduate schools of price theory in favor of infinite horizon intertemporal optimization and game theory has not been a favorable development for young empiricists."
   
5. Will you switch to Spring for the Palm Pre? I'm already on Sprint, so I wouldn't have to.
6. More Hayek (and Buchanan), less Keynes."A father of public choice economics, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, argues that the great flaw in Keynesianism is that it ignores the obvious, self-interested incentives of government actors implementing fiscal policy and creates intellectual cover for what would otherwise be viewed as self-serving and irresponsible behavior by politicians. It is also very difficult to turn off the spigot in better economic times, and Keynes blithely ignored the long-term effects of financing an expanded deficit."
7. The tragedy of the fishes.
8. Asus Eee PC 100oHE put through preliminary testing by LaptopMag.
9. On significance testing in economics.
   
10. Amazon library -- is February 9th a bigger announcement than the Kindle 2.0?
11. Mad about exorbitant bonuses? Blame the tax code.
    
12. How to be a Christian, though an economist, and vice-versa.
    

Consciousness

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The Best and the Worst Jobs

Economists make the top 20 list at #11. Here is the article and the methodology of the report. Here are more great reasons to study economics.

Not A Good Sign

(PhD Comics)

The Daily Dozen

1. Housing affordability at record high.
   
2. Antarctic Cruises: Disaster waiting to happen?
   
3. Netbook sales are up, are they saving or killing the computer industry?
   
4. 5 writers who affirm the importance of travel.
5. The essential non-writer's guide to writing.
6. 2 kids + 0 husbands = family?
7. The once and future e-book. On reading in the digital age.
8. iPhone Rubik Cube Solver. Incredible! When I was a kid, I had to take my cube apart with a screwdriver to solve it. This method is much, much cooler.
9. Netflix profit up 45% in Q4, nears 10 million total subscribers.
   
10. Digital SLR vs. digital super-zoom cameras on safari. Which one is better? For most people, a super-zoom makes a lot of sense. That's what I took with me to Antarctica and I was able to get some shots (and video) I would have never gotten had I used an SLR.
11. Apple vs. Palm: the in-depth analysis.
12. Tokyo's e-paper disaster signs help you escape earthquakes and Godzillas. One of the neatest parts is that they will keep their last displayed image if they ever lose power.
    

"One of the...

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Men Can Take Anything!

The Daily Dozen

1. Printing the NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle.
2. How to travel around the world without flying.
3. Groundhog Day: Phil and Spanish Joe say six more weeks of winter.
4. Happiness research and legal scholarship.
5. Mostly harmless econometrics.
6. The Asus 100HE -- a new netbook with 9.5 hour battery life for $375? Come out with a tablet version that gets this kind of battery life and I'm sold!
7. 2 simple paths to unhappiness: 1) Not getting what you want; and 2) Getting what you want.
8. Quote of the day: "In low-income countries, road traffic accidents account for 3.7 percent of deaths, twice as high as deaths due to malaria." Having traveled to numerous developing countries, I believe it.
   
9. Watch all of Sunday's Super Bowl ads on Hulu.com.
10. John Cochrane of the University of Chicago talks with Russ Roberts about the financial crisis.
11. 7 concepts of natural language learning.
12. Life without lawyers?
    

Invisible piano

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How Government Prolonged the Depression

Policies that decreased competition in product and labor markets were especially destructive.

The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.

The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39). Private hours worked were even lower after FDR took office, averaging 27% below their 1929 level, compared to 18% lower between in 1930-32.

The main lesson we have learned from the New Deal is that wholesale government intervention can -- and does -- deliver the most unintended of consequences. This was true in the 1930s, when artificially high wages and prices kept us depressed for more than a decade, it was true in the 1970s when price controls were used to combat inflation but just produced shortages. It is true today, when poorly designed regulation produced a banking system that took on too much risk.

Read the whole thing.

Court Orders Amish To Follow Building Code Or Vacate Homes

I don't know all the facts behind this case, but it sounds just awful and probably is:

The Johnstown (PA) Tribune-Democrat reported on Friday that a state trial court judge has issued a preliminary injunction against two Amish couples who have refused to comply with county sewage and building code regulations in the houses they are constructing. The court ordered that the two couples, members of the conservative Swartzentruber Amish sect, must either comply with all regulations within 60 days, or else vacate their homes. The order was issued by Judge Norman Krumenacker after he unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a compromise in the dispute by meeting with Amish elders and the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Autistic Kid Plays High School Basketball

An inspiring true story...

The Daily Dozen

1. Leaders go left, but economists get back to the basics.
   
2. Road trip Japanese style -- in a transforming toyota truck.
   
3. Tim Ferriss tries to find the perfect office chair. He settles on the Aeron Chair. I have one too and love it. I bought it years ago at a special discount because my company had bought a lot of them from a local distributor. It remains the only piece of furniture I've ever spent more than $400 on.
4. Some brilliant visual displays of international economic development statistics.
5. Acemoglu: The models are broken.
6. Facebook is now twice as big as MySpace? And judging by how many of my friends have recently added accounts, it's growing strongly.
7. Lobel & Amir on Behavioral Economics, Law, and Policy.
8. How to send text messages from the Kindle.
9. Brew the best possible coffee without breaking the bank.
10. Flatworld: Open source textbooks. This sounds like a great idea to me and I'd really like to see this take off. College expenses are out of control right now making higher education less and less affordable and practical for many people. I'd love to see more innovations like this take place to start giving competition to normal means of acquiring higher education. Here is chapter 1 of a microeconomics textbook as an example.
11. Recession can change a way of life. Tyler Cowen on the current economic downturn. Apparently mental health goes down and physical health goes up.
12. Eyewitness testimonies not as reliable as most people think.
    

Iron Chef Kitteh

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