Amazon Tablet event live blog

We're live at Amazon's Kindle event!

  • Hang tight! The event starts on Wednesday, September 28th at 10:00AM ET / 7:00AM PT

  • We're here -- the banners and tents are up outside and the media trucks are out in force. Whatever this is, Amazon is doing it big.

  • The doors opened and a thousand media types rushed anxiously through... only to be herded into another line. Soon Amazon will box us up and ship us to Prime members for free.
  • We're still just hangin' around. Pretty much every media organization is represented in line -- it's like a little industry party at 9AM. The hype, it grows.

  • And we're in!

  • And just as we're sitting down we're being told the details have been leaked -- the Kindle Fire is a 7-inch tablet that'll sell for $199.

  • Here's the image Bloomberg Businessweek is running with its long profile of Amazon and the Kindle Fire.

  • According to the article, there's a "crop" of new Kindles, including a new $79 model. Sounds like things are about to get serious here.
  • There's a lot of room between $79 and $199 -- we're guessing at least one additional Kindle will fill that gap, possibly two.
  • They're testing out the lighting system -- the entire backdrop behind the screen is a grid of LEDs. It's pretty sweet.
  • And here we go!
  • Starting with a video -- it's a bunch of "real people" talking about a tablet in "New York City two weeks ago."
  • Okay, it's the regular Kindle with e-ink. Jen, a "marketing director," really likes it!.
  • "To be able to increase the text size on the Kindle... has been phenomenal for me." That just happened.
  • People hate their regular paper books now.
  • Jeff Bezos coming on stage now. "Welcome and thank you very much for taking the time this morning."
  • "Four years ago we set out to improve upon the book."
  • "When you decide to reinvent something that's been around for five centuries, you're rightly going to receive some skepticism."
  • Bezos is going through a lot of quotes from the original Kindle launch -- the press really thought it was going to fail.
  • Now a slide showing physical book sales over the past 15 years, compared to Kindle books sold over the past four years. The Kindle really blew up.
  • "This doesn't even include all the free books you can download -- these are paid books."
  • "So why is Kindle working? I believe it's because it's an end-to-end service, and we're improving that service at a rapid pace."
  • "Out of the box, it greets you by name. It's pre-registered, it knows your Amazon credentials."
  • "What would a Kindle end to end service be without books to read? We started with 90,000 books, now it's over a million. And that doesn't include any of the out of copyright books you can read for free."
  • "We used electronic ink so you could read in bright daylight."
  • "When you buy a Kindle book, we're going to keep it for you in the cloud, an archival copy. Go ahead and delete it off your device."
  • "We gave every Kindle a unique email address, so you can just email documents to your Kindle."
  • "We built an ecosystem, so you can buy once, and read everywhere... Android, iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Mac, PC... our HTML5 app."
  • Talking about Kindle Singles and new models of content.
  • "We added real page numbers... this is more technically challenging that one might imagine."
  • "You can now go to 11,000 public libraries.. they'll loan you Kindle books."
  • And we're back on 3G -- the Wi-Fi here totally dropped.
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