Summary: This is a special edition of The Kindle Chronicles podcast, filed from Santa Monica, California, and devoted entirely to today's Amazon press conference at which the following new Kindles were announced, all ready for pre-order: Kindle Fire HD 8.9" 4G for $499, ships November 20. Kindle Fire HD 8.9" for $299, ships November 20. Kindle Fire HD 7" for $199, ships September 14. Kindle Paperwhite 3G with Special Offers for $179, ships October 1. Kindle Paperwhite with Special Offiers or $119, ships October 1. Click here for full video of Jeff Bezos's presentation at the press conference. I want to thank Garrett Riley for accompanying me to the event as tech assistant and helping me organize coverage of the press conference. You will find his blog post about it here, with some great photos. And thanks to everyone who has contributed to the podcast to help defray costs of my trip to Santa Monica for the Amazon announcement. If you'd like to help out and make a donation through the PayPal link at the upper right of the page here by the end of the day Friday September 7th, you will receive a free advance copy of the eBook that I plan to write about the new products and Amazon's latest bold strokes in business strategy. It's going to take a while for the full extent of Amazon's latest inventions to sink in, but I hope you will enjoy this report from Santa Monica to get a feel for Day One of the next generation of Kindles. My thanks to Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek, Andrys Basten of A Kindle World, and the Amazon execs and staffers who took time out after the formal presentations for interviews. CORRECTION: I misunderstood Jay Marine's description of the Kindle Paperwhite's WhisperSync for Voice feature and assumed you can listen to an Audible book on the Paperwhite or hear Text to Speech. This turns out not to be the case. There are no speakers or a headphone port on the Paperwhite. What the new Audible sync feature does is to enable you to listen to an Audible book on another device, and then pick up the reading on your Kindle Whispernet as text only.
