Apple has sold 1,000,000 iPads, and it’s the Kindle’s biggest competition; both wirelessly download books. 

Amazon has a leg up as a book reader, however, in that they’ve grown with Chris Anderson-style ‘Long Tail’ research , they have tens of millions of book customers, know which books are most likely to be downloaded and have those books available for download.  With over 500,000 titles, the Kindle store has the largest selection of books that people want to read, including New York Times Best Sellers and new releases. 

Kindle customers can also discover and download over 1.8 million free, pre-1923, out-of-copyright titles from other websites. Best of all, for readers, will be the ability to sort books and documents into collections.  If you use your kindle to carry around business PDF files, you can now zoom in and pan around to see tables or graphics or small print.

The Kindle has experimental Text-to-Speech feature, so the Kindle can read some newspapers, magazines and books to you.  An experimental web browser reads simple websites such as Google and Wikipedia… and you can transfer MP3 files to listen to music while you read.

The new upgrade will allow users to share book passages on Twitter and Facebook accounts.  Kindles will be lockable with a password and, finally, for those of us with middle aged eyes, there will be larger and sharper font options.

The update should be completely rolled out by late May.