Kindle 4, Kindle Air, Kindle Scribe - What's In A Name?

There's no shortage of speculation regarding a potential Kindle 4 release date at the moment. The Kindle 3 is a year old now, and that's positively geriatric in the world of personal electronic gadgets these days - annual updates and upgrades are definitely the norm.

Even if the Kindle 3 wasn't coming towards the end of its shelf life, the recent release of two newer, more modern readers - the Nook Touch and the iRiver Story HD reader - has raised the stakes in the ebook reader market.

The new Nook looks like a big step in the right direction by Barnes and Noble. It could really run the Kindle a lot closer in future. The appearance of the iRiver Story reader - the first ebook reader to be fully integrated with the Google eBookstore - should also mean that the ebook reader market is much less of a Kindle vs Nook two horse race in future.

So, just looking at the market conditions, it did seem as if Amazon should really be thinking about releasing the Kindle 4 sooner rather than later. Then Amazon dropped the price of refurbished Kindle 3 readers to just $99.99 - which many people took to be a sign of an impending Kindle 4 launch.

It could just be coincidence - keeping inventory levels as low as possible is just good practice after all. However, the last time that Amazon did this was last year - just 4 weeks before the Kindle 3 replaced the Kindle 2. All things considered, it does seem highly probable that the Kindle 4 may be here sometime in the very near future.

In fact, so confident are many industry watchers that the Kindle 4 is on the way, that rumor mongering has progressed beyond the possibility of an early Kindle 4 launch to more esoteric matters - such as what Amazon will call the Kindle 4.

A little while ago, Amazon purchased the domain name "kindlescribe.com". They also picked up "Kindlescribes.com" into the bargain. Inevitably, this generated the rumor that the new Kindle that the new reader would be called the Kindle Scribe.

Needless to say, this also led to speculation that the new Kindle would come with a stylus so that Kindle Scribe owners would be able to add notes and comments to any text that they were reading. You can see the logic certainly.

It's probably worth pointing out that Amazon own close to one thousand domain names. The large majority of them do not lead to product launches.

The "kindlescribe" duo were both expired domains, which Amazon may have picked up as a defensive measure.

Amazon also own the domains "kindleair.com" and "kindlewave.com" - so those might be possible names also. Or those could just as easily be domains which Amazon has picked up just to stop anyone else getting their hands on them.

Whatever the new Kindle is called, it really does start to look as if it will be here fairly soon. It's good fun to speculate on what it will be called while we're waiting - but it's not all that important. Most people, except Amazon of course, will probably call it the Kindle 4 anyway.