Codenamed Fiona and named for lighting a fire, the Kindle reshaped reading
In 2004 Jeff Bezos told his staff to build the best electronic reader in the world before any rival managed it. The project went by the codename Fiona. Two branding consultants later offered a single word, kindle, as in starting a flame, reasoning that reading at its best sets minds alight.
Amazon's hardware subsidiary Lab126 produced the first device in 2007, and Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma supplied the name. A larger Kindle DX with a 9.7-inch screen followed in 2009, and for years it stood alone among E Ink models that were not six inches, until the Oasis 2 arrived in 2017. Along the way came keyboard versions, the lit Paperwhite, cheap touchscreen models and the Fire tablets, while reading apps spread to Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and browsers.
Under the plastic sits a Linux kernel running a Java reading app, with software updates slipping in automatically while the device sleeps on Wi-Fi. Readers can tap a word for a dictionary or Wikipedia entry, adjust fonts and margins, or pick OpenDyslexic and darker bold typefaces. X-Ray, added from the Kindle Touch onward, surfaces a book's recurring characters, places and themes. Highlighted passages pile up in a single plain-text clippings file that loses all formatting.
Formats were long a sore point. The original read Mobipocket, plain text and Amazon's own AZW; PDFs arrived natively with a Kindle 2 firmware update. EPUB, the most common open standard, stayed off-limits, forcing owners toward conversion tools such as Calibre or jailbreaks running KOReader, until Amazon said in late April 2022 that its Send to Kindle service would accept it. Before 2021, pushing a document over the old 3G connection cost 15 cents per megabyte, and travellers abroad were once charged 1.99 dollars per book download.
Convenience carries a trade-off. Devices can report the last page reached, time spent in each book, and every highlight or note, so Amazon can know who is reading what, how far they got and which lines they marked. Publishers cap how many devices share one purchase, from one to six. Since July 18, 2011, students have been able to rent textbooks, and Kindle Unlimited opens over a million titles for a monthly fee.
Source: Amazon Kindle
