Amazon.com started shipping Amazon Kindle 2 a day earlier than originally planned.
Kindle 2 began shipping yesterday to customers who were in line for the original Kindle and customers who pre-ordered beginning Feb. 9. New orders placed now will be released for immediate shipping.
“The response from customers to Kindle 2 has been tremendous. In order to ensure we ship Kindle 2 by the original ship day of Feb. 24, we started shipping one day early,” said Ian Freed, vice president of Amazon Kindle, in a statement.
The Kindle 2 offers a slimmer design with longer battery life, faster page turns, seven times more storage, sharper images and a new “read-to-me” feature.
The read-to me feature recently came under fire by the Author’s Guild, which claims the device’s ability to read text out loud infringes on audiobook copyrights.
The Kindle, which uses Sprint’s network to download books, boasts “Earth’s biggest e-bookstore,” allowing customers access to more than 240,000 books, magazines and newspapers.
At a price of $359 dollars, there’s talk that the Kindle 2 is a bit pricey for a standalone electronic reading device. A proliferation of smartphone applications such as Stanza and BookZ can perform similar tasks and allow users access to online bookstores without the need to buy an extra device on which to read their e-books.