Jeff Bezos: Color Kindle E-Reader Is “A Long Way Out”

Speaking Tuesday at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO Jeff Bezos said that a color version of the Kindle e-reader is “still a long way out.”

According to Bezos, adding color to the Kindle’s e-ink display, while possible in the lab, is simply “not ready for prime-time production.”

Don’t think for a second, though, that Amazon intends to let the iPad run away with the e-book market without a fight.

DON'T MISS
Amazon CEO Says “Stay Tuned” For iPad-Challenging Kindle Tablet

Bezos appears to have been very specifically saying that a color e-ink Kindle wouldn’t be out soon, but his wording leaves the possibility of an iPad-like Amazon tablet wide open. Trying to beat Apple at the tablet hardware game is probably folly, but there’s got to be a lot of temptation in the Amazon offices to give it a try.

4 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by John Brownlee.

Posted in Hardware, iPad, News |

Me
A smart and realistic CEO that lives in a real world probably wouldn’t even dare to invest on a battle that’s clearly already lost. That Kindle thing was doomed from day 1, and by the time they may be read to compete with the iPad (probably not earlier than a year from now), Apple will have already launched a 2nd Generation iPad. They will always be ahead, at least for some time.
Just let them be, and let the product envy inspire you.
Just my humble advice.
BtotheD
The iPad cant touch the Kindle as an e-reader. Sure it’s better at everything else, but the current implementation of e-ink destroys LCD/LED for true reading. Why people clamor for color e-ink is beyond me. Most books have zero color in them outside of the cover.
yargo
Bezos Report: Color is hard!
“Now print this out on my dot matrix printer and distribute it to all the board members.”
http://ubmbarb.wordpress.com/ Barbara
I’m still going to read books on wood pulp until I can make notations on electronic pages. I’m constantly scribbling notes in the margins when I find something interesting or have questions. I’m betting on Apple making that happen first.