$139 Kindle coming next month

Amazon has announced that it is releasing a $139 Kindle (wi-fi only), and a $189 Kindle (wi-fi and 3G). Both will ship August 27th–and pre-orders are available now
“>. The new Kindle is 21% smaller, 15% lighter, and is only for reading ebooks–no video snippets, etc. Mr. Bezos is quoted as saying “For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.” The screen will still be 6 inches, but the internal memory will be 4GB.

This sounds enticing to me! I’ve been waiting for Qualcomm’s Mirasol color ereader–I would love to read picture books, magna, and comic books in color–but if the price point gets low enough for a greyscale ebook reader, I just might make the jump, at least for novels. What about you?

Check out more about the new Kindle on enGadget and wsj.

July 28th, 2010