Front-lit Kindle Touch

Since Barnes & Noble introduced the front-lit Nook with GlowLight in April, we’ve been waiting for a response from Amazon. The Verge has leaked images of the “Kindle Paperwhite,” which appears to be a front-lit Kindle Touch with a whiter, brighter and higher-resolution screen. The text on the images is in French and promises eight hours weeks of battery life even with the light on. It also looks as if Amazon has revamped the Kindle Store on the device, adding an option to see (and possibly download) the ebooks you’ve stored in the cloud.

Kindle Fire with camera and mapping

Also at The Verge are a couple pictures of a Kindle Fire with what appears to be a front-facing camera (the old Kindle Fire has no camera) and video chat.

Reuters reports the new Kindle Fire will also have mapping capabilities, citing unidentified sources: “Amazon will also add location capabilities to the new Kindle Fire, which requires either a GPS chip or a process known as Wi-Fi triangulation.” As my colleague Ki Mae Heussner reported in July, Amazon bought 3D mapping startup UpNext; Reuters says Nokia is providing the mapping technology.

New content deals for Amazon Prime Instant Video

In an effort to compete with Netflix and HBO Go, Amazon is actively building its free streaming video offerings, which are free to Amazon Prime members (who pay $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and other perks). The company recently signed a deal with NBCUniversal for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “Battlestar Galactica,” bringing the total number of movies and TV episodes it offers to over 22,000. And it launched an instant video iPad app in early August.

The press conference’s Los Angeles location could suggest new movie or TV partnerships, and the NYT‘s  David Pogue said in this week’s column that “an imminent Amazon deal will bring thousands more movies to its catalog, I hear.”

The U.S. State Department, which was considering a $16.5-million no-bid contract with Amazon to provide Kindles, content and services for overseas language programs, has officially withdrawn its proposal, saying it “intends to conduct additional market research and reexamine its requirements for this program.”

Gary Price at Library Journal’s Infodocket blog first discovered the notice about the withdrawal of the contract, which was posted to the State Department’s website August 15 at 4:00 p.m. ET.

A State Department spokesperson provided the following statement:

The Department of State continues to pursue technology that enhances our ability to provide international audiences with relevant, real-time content on U.S. society, culture, and English language learning.  In order to conduct additional market research and further explore technological options for our public diplomacy programs, the Department of State opted on August 15 to end the Request for Proposals for the Amazon Kindle in favor of proceeding with a Request for Information (RFI) process. This action will open to all vendors the opportunity to respond to the Department’s requirements for a mobile learning program.

The contract that the State Department was considering in June would have provided 2,500 Kindle Touches in the first year, preloaded with 50 titles apiece, at a guaranteed $2.29 million, with the option to renew the contract for four more years. The upper limit on the five-year contract was 7,000 Kindles per year. State Department spokesman Philippe Reines suggested to me at the time that many of the books would be in the public domain (i.e., free) and that other services would include preloading content and shipping devices.

If the contract had gone through and was renewed for a total of five years, and if State had purchased a total of 35,000 Kindle Touch 3Gs each priced at $170.10 (a 10 percent discount) during that time, each with a case and adapter valued at $20, that would have left $9,846,500 for content, shipping and “associate costs.”

It appeared that the deal would take place, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in June that they would hold a joint press conference to announce the Kindle Mobile Learning Initiative. Then the State Department postponed the press conference to an unspecified later date. It never took place.

The National Federation of the Blind filed a complaint with the State Department saying that any agreement to purchase devices that are inaccessible to the blind is a violation of the law, but it is unclear whether the complaint had any bearing on the deal’s failure.

Update, 6/15/2012, 6:07 PM: It appears the deal will go through, as Jeff Bezos and Hillary Clinton are holding a press conference to announce the Kindle Mobile Learning Initiative next Wednesday. more here

Update, 6/11/12, 10:35 PM: NextGov has backtracked on its original post to say that the State Department is “considering” this program and that it “could include as many as 35,000 Kindle e-Readers” over a 5-year, $16.5 million contract. According to NextGov, “State is willing to guarantee approximately $2.3 million in the first year for at least 2,500 Kindles and content, the spokesman said. [The $2.3 million is not mentioned in the government documents cited below.] It is waiting for Amazon to come back with a proposal for further negotiations.”

So if the program were to include as many as 35,000 Kindles, you can use our 7,000/year estimate below. I have several questions for the State Department and I look forward to hearing back from them.

The U.S. State Department has signed is considering a no-bid, $16.5 million contract with Amazon to provide Kindle Touches — 2,500 of them to start, preloaded with 50 titles each — for its overseas language-education programs. So why has the government decided the Kindle is the best e-reader — and what is Amazon providing for that money?

Update: The base contract’s “anticipated value is $16,500,000 over the life of the contract, which shall be one base year plus 4 option years.”

In a document justifying the no-bid contract, the State Department says it’s identified “the Amazon Kindle as the only e-Reader on the market that meets the Government’s needs, and Amazon as the only company possessing the essential capabilities required by the Government.” It has international 3G, text-to-speech features and a long battery life, which “other e-readers such as the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader Daily and Kobe [sic] e-Reader cannot provide.”

International 3G was “a firm requirement since all devices are to be used overseas,” the government says, and “the portability and durability of the Kindle is unique, and is required by the government due to overseas shipment requirements and use in public facilities by students.” (Worldreader, in its pilot program giving Kindles to kids in Ghana, found Kindles actually break a lot, but perhaps other e-reader break more?)

Here’s why the Apple iPad was eliminated as a possibility: Its “additional features are not only unnecessary, but also present unacceptable security and usability risks for the government’s needs in this particular project. Critically, the Apple iPad falls short on two requirements: the centrally managed platform for registration and content delivery, and battery life.”

Less clear: Are 2,500 Kindle Touches really worth $16.5 million? Update: The contract doesn’t limit the State Department to 2,500 Kindles for the $16.5 million. That money is the upper limit of what could be spent over 5 years, and could cover the cost of more Kindles. In a semi-clarification, the Atlantic notes that “the department was getting the actual Kindle devices for 10 percent off retail price.” I’ve asked the State Department for clarification in both e-mails and phone calls and am waiting for them to get back to me.

The Kindle Touch 3G is $189. At a 10 percent discount, that’s $170.10 per Kindle device (not including the preloaded content). I don’t know if the State Department receives an unlimited number of Kindles under its contract; I don’t think so, but that’s what I’m waiting to hear from them. I also don’t know which titles are preloaded.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of estimates.

Estimate 1: The State Department places an initial order for 2,500 Kindles, as stated in the government documents, and then orders 2,500 more Kindles each yearfor a total of five years. That’s $2,126,250 for the devices, leaving over $14 million for the 50 e-books each Kindle is preloaded with, and other stuff.

Estimate 2: The State Department orders 7,000 Kindles each year for five years. That’s $5,953,500 for the devices, leaving about $10.5 million for the 50 e-books each Kindle is preloaded with, and other stuff.

What’s the other stuff? Amazon is responsible for shipping the Kindles overseas, providing 24/7 customer service (something a smaller company, including Barnes & Noble, might have had trouble handling), sharing data on how the Kindles are used to access content and pushing serialized content to the Kindles regularly. Amazon is also responsible for disabling “standard features, as requested by DoS, for the device such as individual purchasing ability.”

The news was first reported by NextGov and picked up by Infodocket.

In a suit filed Thursday in Seattle federal court, a shell company called Network Presentations Solutions (NPS) accused Amazon of infringing its technology by offering “Special Offers and Sponsored Screensavers” on the Kindle, the Kindle Keyboard and the Kindle Touch.

NPS claims the Kindle devices infringe US Patent 5,748,190 because they are “personal computers that show Sponsored Screensavers .. at predetermined times of inactivity.”

So who is NPS and what do they invent? Well, nothing it turns out. The history of the patent in question shows that it was issued to a Norwegian in 1998 and has since passed through a series of hands until it was obtained late last year by Acacia Research Group. Acacia assigned the patent to the NPS shell in December.

In intellectual property circles, Acacia has been dubbed the “mother of all patent trolls,” a derogatory term for companies that don’t produce anything but instead collect patents to sue those who do.

Despite the passage of patent reform legislation last year, the “troll” business model is flourishing as veteran patent lawyers leave their law firms to form venture capital funds that invest in the lawsuits.

Acacia is seeking damages and the destruction of all Kindles that have the infringing screen saver.

Amazon Screen Saver Patent

Amazon is not shipping the Kindle Touch, which was released in the U.S. in November, to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy or Spain. All of those countries have dedicated Amazon sites. “We’re working to make Kindle Touch available to customers from our international websites soon,” an Amazon spokeswoman told me.

Amazon announced today that “for the third week in a row, customers are purchasing well over 1 million Kindle devices per week.”

The figure is not broken out by device (Kindle Fire vs. dedicated e-reader like the Kindle Touch). It is not clear how much over 1 million the number is.

Amazon said the Kindle Fire has been the most popular item on Amazon since its launch 11 weeks ago, and “Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks,” said Dave Limp, VP, Amazon Kindle. Which makes total sense since people are doing their holiday shopping now, not so much three weeks ago. But this week-on-week thing may be mentioned because of the recent spate of bad reviews for the Kindle Fire.

Is this the beginning of the end of Amazon’s mathiness? I hope not, because it is fun to see the different ways they find to not say how many Kindles they’ve sold. “Over 1 million per week” is good, but I would prefer a statement that somehow ties into the song “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

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