Amazon won the ebook reader war. Like the iPod, the Swiffer, or Jell-O, the Kindle is just what you buy when you want what it does. Barnes & Noble and Sony went down swinging trying to compete, and Kobo and Iriver are but gnats to be swatted by the great Amazon behemoth. Last year's $119 Kindle Paperwhite was the best ebook reader ever made, the default choice, the one I recommend to everyone without a second's thought — and 12 months later it still is. There isn't even viable competition at this point.
Yet there's still a new Paperwhite this fall, a new $119 E Ink reader with a series of hardware upgrades and some new software as well. A few things have been changed, but this is very much the same device it was a year ago. It's Amazon at the height of its powers, with nothing to prove and nothing to lose. The question now: when you win a market, when no one else even really puts up a fight anymore, what do you do next?
In the Kindle's case, you make sure the Paperwhite never gets stashed in a drawer somewhere, a forgotten impulse buy. You find new and clever ways to make sure people keep right on reading, and buying, books.
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