Amazon in an unannounced gesture cut the price of the Kindle 2 to $299. The move is the first price drop on any Kindle since the original was reduced to $359 and puts a larger gap between this and the larger Kindle DX, which still sits at its original $489 price. The company didn't provide a reason of its own for the cut, which comes even though Amazon has periodically sold out.

The Kindle 2 is Amazon's smallest e-book reader and is thinner than most music players at 0.36 inches deep. To date, it lacks the native PDF reading added to the DX but continues to draw on free 3G access from Sprint for downloading books, and using an experimental web browser. Its most distinctive feature is a text-to-speech feature that, when allowed by publishers, reads books aloud without needing any formatting in advance.