Amazon has announced a new, cheaper, reduced-price Amazon Kindle. The new ad-supported Kindle with Special Offers, as it is known, is identical in hardware to the wifi Kindle – in fact it is a wi-fi Kindle, only it displays advertising along the bottom of the home screen, along with “sponsored screensavers” (which users get to help pick using Amazon’s ‘Hot or Not’ style Admash. In exchange for letting Amazon have your eyeballs in this distinctly Google-esque manner, you get your wireless Kindle with ads for $25.00 less – $114.00 instead of $139.00. Worth it?

Ever wish you could share your Kindle books with your friends and family, Kindle to Kindle, or Kindle to Kindle reader app? The latest Kindle news is that now you can! With Amazon’s new Kindle Lending service, you can share books on Kindle which you have purchased with your friends and family, even if they don’t have a Kindle book reader of their own! They can read the books for Kindle that you loan them using the Kindle for Android application, the Kindle for Blackberry app, the Kindle for iPad and iPhone apps, or the Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC software, all of which are free! If they have an email address, you can loan them your lendable Kindle books free!

This summer Amazon reported that Kindle books were outselling regular books 2:1. Now Amazon is saying that the top 10 books selling on Kindle are outselling their paper book counterparts by that same 2:1 margin.

Hold onto your hats – and your books – because this just may shock you. Amazon this week released a report that says that sales of the Amazon Kindle versions of books are outselling hardcover books nearly 2:1!

As more and more people are adopting the Apple iPad tablet, it’s inevitable that people will be making comparisons: Kindle vs iPad – iPad vs Kindle – which one is better? We feel that there is a clear winner in the iPad versus Kindle contest, and here’s why (and you can see for yourself with these Kindle versus iPad screen shots.)

If you have a Mac, you are in for a treat! Amazon just released their new free “Amazon Kindle for Mac” application, and it’s awesome. It allows you to not only purchase Kindle books and Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions directly from your desktop for delivery to your Kindle, but it allows you to download and read your Kindle books right on your Mac!

Last week we reported that the Amazon Kindle was getting an app store and lots of new applications, and we asked the question, “but why?” Among other things, we pointed out that with the lack of a touch screen, any applications for the Kindle would be severely limited in terms of functionality, usefulness, and just plain fun. (You can read our discussion of Amazon announcing Applications for the Kindle here.) Well, guess what. It seems that the Kindle is getting a touch screen.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Amazon has announced that the Amazon Kindle is about to be opened up to 3rd-party developers, and to have its own Kindle app store, so as to create a whole new generation of Kindle applications. Which means that, yay, you’ll be able to play Sudoku on your Kindle – but without a touch screen what’s the point? – while you still can’t perform such basic no-brainers such as making a gift of a book to someone else on their Kindle.

Amazon’s Kindle reader has the ability to do text-to-speech, meaning that it can read books outloud to you. Perfect for those who are sight-impaired or blind, right? Well, it would be, except accessing the text-to-speech function requires navigating menus that only a sighted-person can easily navigate. That is not only the finding of schools participating in an Amazon Kindle trial program, but the complaint of a lawsuit which has now been filed against at least one of the schools participating in the trial.

Amazon has closed a chapter of its history that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” Bezos was, of course, referring to Amazon’s removing, without warning, copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of nearly 2000 customers.

In a scene that seems straight out of, well, 1984, Amazon reached out across its WhisperNet network and removed all copies of Animal Farm and 1984 itself from every Kindle and Kindle 2 which had purchased and downloaded the books from Amazon. So high school student Justin Gawronski has sued them, claiming in his lawsuit that the loss of his copy of 1984 has cost him far more than the cost of the book, and includes the loss of all of the notes he’d taken and attached to the book on his Kindle, and the value of the effort in creating them.

Guess what! The Internet Patrol is now available on the Amazon Kindle ebook reader! How cool is that?! Of course, you probably know that there are Kindle books (a Kindle book is a book which has been made available on the Kindle reader in ebook format), but did you know that there were Kindle blogs and other publications?

Did you know that you can get free Kindle books for your Amazon Kindle reader? This is in addition to the Kindle books, newspapers and magazines that you can download to your Kindle from Amazon. (If you don’t already have an Amazon Kindle reader you can order an Amazon Kindle reader here).

If you want to put a Kindle into the hands of a child – and want to figure out how to disable the Kindle network – to turn off the WhisperNet so that a child can’t turn it on, you’ve come to the right place.

The Amazon Kindle book reader has until now been in very short supply, with a constant refrain of “has my Kindle shipped?” from thousands of purchasers. But now if you’ve been hankering after a Kindle Amazon has great news for you. The Kindle reader is in short supply no more – it’s in stock, and you can expect Kindle delivery within normal delivery time, says Amazon.