$99 Kindle Touch, $79 Kindle Basic

[PGHammer]

While the new Kindle Fire understandably garnered a lot of the buzz at the press conference today, Amazon did lauch another new Kindle product (and dropped the price of an existing one).

With the same availability timeframe as the Kindle Fire is the $99 Kindle Touch, but even that wasn't the biggie in the *other news* category - the biggie (in my humble opinion) is the $79 Kindle (AKA the Kindle Basic).

Why is the Kindle Basic such a biggie?

First off, it's the price - $79. Yes - it's strictly an e-reader. However, that's the typical reason folks buy a Kindle or any other dedicated/semi-dedicated e-reader.

Second, the Kindle format is pervasive in the extreme - it's not just the major format for mass-market *published/sold* e-books, it's also a major format for free e-books (and from more than just Amazon's Kindle Store - even Amazon acknowledges this by pointing out the Kindle e-book connection to local public libraries). Three of the largest such libraries in the United States (New York City, Enoch Pratt, and the Library of Congress) have sections dedicated to Kindle-format e-reads.

The large amount of free Kindle-format content (which will doubtless get larger as some content in the moribund, and about to die, Microsoft Reader format is eventually, and doubtless inevitably, converted to Kindle format) is another reason to grab a Kindle Basic. (One thing that has kept *me* from buying a Kindle has been the price - despite being a voracious reader and having a *lot* of Kindle-format content; which I read via the Kindle reader software for either Windows or OS X. Who needs anything more than wi-fi when I'm pulling the content from my own PC, which is already connected to a wireless LAN? The bargain price could pull a lot of fellow fence-sitters off the fence.)

Lastly, unlike the Fire or the Touch, the price-lowered Kindle Basic is available now.