Are Smartphones Becoming Smart Alecks?

New Devices Dish Out Sarcasm, Tell Jokes; 'Two iPhones Walk Into a Bar'

Now even your phone talks back.

One of the top draws to Apple's iPhone 4S is its new speech recognition software, called Siri, that's designed to talk back. In San Francisco, Ian Sherr hears some new owners' favorite questions.

Matt Legend Gemmell, a software designer from Edinburgh, got a new Apple Inc. iPhone on Friday and asked it: "Who's your daddy?"
"You are," the phone answered, in the voice of an authoritative man.

Earlier, he commanded: "Beam me up." This time, the iPhone responded: "Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode."

The real science of artificial intelligence is finally catching up to science fiction. HAL 9000, the creepy sentient computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," has been incarnated, in the form of Siri, a virtual personal assistant that comes with Apple's new iPhone 4S, which arrived in stores Friday.

How Smart Is Siri?

The phone takes verbal commands and questions, and responds with computer-generated speech.
Real humans are responding to this alarming breakthrough by asking their iPhones ridiculous questions. 

The good news is, Siri has a sense of humor.

Micah Gantman, the director of mobile business at software firm HasOffers.com in Seattle, asked his iPhone: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" It answered: "Depends if you're talking about African or European wood."

Nicky Kelly, a 40-year-old from Suffolk, U.K., asked her iPhone: "Tell me a joke." It answered: "Two iPhones walk into a bar...I forget the rest."

There are already websites to collect some of Siri's best material, including one called "S— That Siri Says." Some of the responses appear to be pre-programmed.

It's what's inside that counts - such is true in the case of the new iPhone, the iPhone 4S. Should you upgrade? Walt Mossberg gives his assessment and tests the personal assistant feature, Siri, live on today's special edition of Digits.

Google Inc. is in on the AI joke, too, with its smartphone and search technology. 

After 13 years of research, some of the world's smartest engineers have created algorithms able to answer questions such as "What's that movie that's backwards and the guy can't remember anything?" (Answer: "Memento.")

Hold a Google Android phone up to your mouth and ask "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" It will answer, in text on the screen, "42," a reference to the favorite geek book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
A lot of work went into so much artificial sarcasm.

 

A customer displays an iPhone 4S at a Sprint store in Palo Alto, Calif., Friday.

The creators of Siri put "deep thought" into the personality of their software, says Norman Winarsky, a co-founder of the company that was bought by Apple for $200 million in 2010. Siri was born out of an artificial intelligence project at SRI International, a research institute. 

Siri has two distinct systems at its heart. One listens and translates what customers are saying, the other interprets the meaning behind the request and responds. It's in that last part where the sass comes in.

"There were many conversations within the team about whether it should be gender neutral" or "should have an 'attitude,' " said Mr. Winarsky, who didn't go to Apple, and still works at SRI. The result, before the software was bought by Apple, was "occasionally a light attitude," he said.

When Apple began integrating Siri into the iPhone, the team focused on keeping its personality friendly and humble—but also with an edge, according to a person who worked at Apple on the project. As Apple's engineers worked on the software, they were often thinking, "How would we want a person to respond?" this person said.

The Siri group, one of the largest software teams at Apple, fine-tuned Siri's responses in an attempt to forge an emotional tie with its customers. To that end, Siri regularly uses a customer's nickname in responses, as well as those of other important people and places in his or her life. "We thought of it almost as a person on the phone," this person said. 

An Apple spokeswoman declined to answer questions about how Siri works. It uses different voices in each of its available markets: female in the U.S., Australia and Germany, and male in the U.K. and France.

Some of the Siri's jokes were apparently built by geeks, for geeks. Aral Balkan, a U.K.-based software designer and self-described "Renaissance Geek" asked Siri: "Do you know Eliza?"—a reference to ELIZA, one of the first experiments in natural language processing by computers, created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Siri's response: "Do you know Eliza? She was my first teacher!"
Ask the iPhone to "Open the pod bay doors"—a reference to the movie "2001"—and some users say it answers back in a frighteningly slow voice, reminiscent of HAL 9000, the computer that leaves an astronaut to die in space. "I'm afraid I can't do that," says Siri.

Sometimes she punctuates that answer with, "We intelligent agents will never live that down, apparently."
What makes the current crop of artificial intelligence services so fun isn't just that they can parrot back answers to prescribed questions. Computers have done that for years, including a 2004 website called "The Subservient Chicken," which featured a video of a man in chicken costume who would appear to do whatever a user would type into a box on a website. (Behind the scenes, software recognized more than 400 commands for which it could play video snippets, including "build a fort" and "walk like an Egyptian.")

Apple's advances in artificial intelligence can carry on limited conversations about ridiculous topics. Tell Siri "I need to hide a body," and it asks "What kind of place are you looking for?" and lists a number of options, including mines and swamps. 

Understanding the quirkier fascinations of the human mind is the next frontier for artificial intelligence, said Henry Lieberman, a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab. For the past 12 years, his lab has been gathering "common sense" human knowledge, and putting it into a database. So far, it has one million entries. The average human understands about 100 million different "common sense" ideas.

That database, which is being built by volunteers online, has as much personality and humor as the people who contribute to it, he said. Already, it is over-weighted in entries on topics such as kittens. "We have a lot of knowledge about trees, not so much about aardvarks," he said.

Siri, too, doesn't have the answer to everything.

Paul Johnson, a photographer from Lynn Haven, Fla. asked it: "What's the meaning of life?" Siri's answer: "That's easy....It's a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general."

Other users have gotten a different response. When blogger Joshua Topolsky asked Siri about the meaning of life, it said: "I can't answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204774604576631271813770508.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

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Laurel & Hardy Dance To Santana

from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkZGg0qNdCc

Also notice all the business in the background.  Thx Wendy for this gem !

Jobs - Digital Immortality As A New Device

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203388804576616921133007668.html?KEYWORDS=Jenkins


Steve Jobs was a private man who died in public. In latter years, he took the stage at Apple events knowing that, at least at first, the audience's focus would be on him and the toll his disease had taken on his vibrant persona. 

Unlike a lot of CEOs, he seldom took to a stage for any other reason than to talk about Apple products, such as to declaim that the rich should pay more taxes. Bizarrely, he was even chided for not conforming, in the apologetic fashion of the truly rich, to the demand that he be seen conspicuously doing good works with his wealth—as if the work he was already doing was not a good use of his time. When he presented himself to the public, it was to offer instruction on only two subjects. One was Apple, and the other, in a famous address to graduating students at Stanford, was death.

Jobs reflected at length on the undesirability of death from the individual point of view, and the usefulness of it from nature's point of view. He offered no comfort. He was not Thomas Buddenbrook, nonhero of Thomas Mann's novel, who briefly glimpses a kind of peace in thinking that the stuff of which he is made will return to the universe from which he borrowed it. And even that arid peace promptly departs, never to return, and he dies regretting that he had to die, just as most of us will.

Jobs made it clear that he did not welcome death, but also that life could be more interesting knowing that death would be coming.

One wonders, then, with what mixed feelings he viewed his Silicon Valley compatriots who've been seeking ways to make sure, at least for themselves, death never comes. No doubt they are being perfectly reasonable. When wealthy enough to satisfy every material appetite many times over, it make sense to try to prolong those appetites indefinitely through cryogenics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

This would not have been Jobs's interest in the subject. He likely would have been more intrigued by the specific claim, advanced by inventor Ray Kurzweil and other advocates of "technological singularity," that soon our individualities will be able to live eternally through digital electronics.

What kind of device should our consciousness occupy? 
Should it have a 4-inch screen or a 9-inch screen? Should it fit in a pocket or backpack? Should it have Bluetooth? Where should our essence primarily reside, in the cloud or in device memory? How much battery life would the user want?
And who is the user?

Hmmm. Jobs looked at technology from the perspective of the user, who wanted an object both beautiful and beautifully functional. If the user is our "survivors"—i.e., our loved ones who still exist in physical form—he might conclude that the most important feature such a device could have is an off-switch—a permanent one.

Indeed, he might conclude that the whole flaw in the Kurzweil vision is that anybody anywhere would have any lasting use for us, that our sticking around in digital form would be welcome or valuable in any way.

He might conclude that such a device should have a battery that lasts, oh, about a month, and then goes permanently dead. He might conclude that our essence should not be inscribed on a hard drive or a thumb drive—but in D-RAM memory, the kind that vanishes forever when the power is shut off.

Such a device would let our friends and relations prolong their goodbyes for a few weeks while also avoiding the subsequent guilt when days, weeks and soon years go by without any urge to revisit their electronically immortal but increasingly irrelevant loved one. Such a device wouldn't cure death or materially delay death. It would make death better. Create a month or so of pure communion with the loved one, via a sumptuous screen and high-fidelity headset, untroubled by medical decisions and interventions, free of pain—but also free of the more pleasant forms of physical urgency.

Such a device would offer more comfort, perhaps, to the survivor than to the departed, for whom artificial immortality in any form—whether it's leaving behind an autobiography or monument or foundation—invariably proves a poor substitute for not dying. Electronic immortality would likely prove no less so. Death would still demand that its purpose be served, clearing the way for life to continue, leaving the past behind, where it belongs.

Steve Jobs, who was special, was not of the idea that anyone is special. But leave it to Apple. The iCrypt, whatever form it takes, would undoubtedly be done with the taste, attention to detail, and understanding of the customer that he and his colleagues brought to everything they did.

Steve Job's Philosophy - A Secular Prophet

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. 

It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. 

Your time is limited, so don't waste it. 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576615403028127550.html

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

 

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.
That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

Brett Arends discusses on Lunch Break why he believes Steve Jobs was the best chief executive of his generation and wasn't just a technology genius but also a hype master.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg joins this special edition of Digits to discuss Steve Jobs's post-PC vision for the future and what his path would have been had he lived longer, as well as what he believes motivated him throughout his legendary career.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.
In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Dow Jones's Neal Lipschutz discuss Apple's future and the challenges any company faces after the loss of its innovator-in-chief.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. Wall Street Journal managing editor Alan Murray and editors discuss Jobs's legacy, early reactions to his death and how his showmanship changed the retail and tech landscape.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University. 

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.
It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"
Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities? 

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?
For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."
Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

The Wisdom of Dogs

http://www.any-book-in-print.com/desk_signs/wisdom_of_dogs_ds.htm

One Hit Wonders !

The list contains recording artists who reached the Top 40 of the U.S. pop chart (the Billboard Hot 100) with just one single
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1980s_one-hit_wonders_in_the_United_States


http://www.onehitwondercentral.com/80s.cfm

Celebrity Workout Music Playlists

Find out what music celebrities are listening to on their workout playlists, from cardio mixes to cool down.

http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/workout/music/celebrity-playlists/

Amazon Ups The Game with Kindle Fire

Amazon.com Inc. jumped into the tablet computer fray, escalating its rivalry with Apple Inc. as each aims to provide both the devices and digital stores where people buy books, songs and movies.

Standing on stage in front of a large New York audience, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos Wednesday unveiled a music- and video-playing tablet dubbed the Kindle Fire. The color touch-screen gadget takes direct aim at Apple's market-dominating iPad—particularly with its price of $199, far below the iPad's starting price of $499.

Amazon debuted four new Kindles in New York on Wednesday with features including free wireless 3G, new e-ink, touch interface and streaming content. Stu Woo reports on digits.

The online retailer is gambling it can succeed with its tablet where several other giants, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., have so far failed. Unlike those companies, Amazon already has a vast library of digital content to sell and tens of millions of credit-card numbers.

A Slew of Tablets

View Interactive

Amazon.com via Bloomberg News

A bevy of new and upgraded tablets and e-readers are on the market. See how the base models for the different devices stack up, including Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet.

More photos and interactive graphics

The move highlights how the battle lines are blurring in retail, media and technology. Apple, once known as a computer company, is now the world's biggest music retailer and a leading phone maker. Amazon has morphed from a discount retailer of physical books to a digital department store that streams movies and sells its own gadgets.

Amazon's new Kindle Fire, which will offer magazine content and streaming videos, takes aim at Apple's tablet dominance. How does the Kindle Fire stack up against the iPad 2? Should Apple be worried? Stu Woo and Dan Gallagher join digits.

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While Amazon has had some success in new markets—it claims its Kindle e-book reader outsells other goods it offers on its website, for instance—the Kindle Fire puts the company into a fast-growing but competitive field.

The competition is likely to heat up further, with Barnes & Noble Inc. expected to release its own tablet next month. The bookseller already has a tablet-like device in the Nook Color. The new tablet is expected to provide faster access to the Web, a broader array of apps, and better video-playing. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Overall, Apple has sold 29 million iPads since releasing it in early 2010. Apple had 68% of the tablet market in this year's second quarter, according to data tracker IDC.

While Amazon's new device could hurt the iPad, Allen Weiner, an analyst with industry-tracker Gartner Research, said Apple could do something from either a technological or pricing standpoint to lure consumers and content providers who might be tempted by the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is only Amazon's second foray into the hardware business, after selling the Kindle reader for four years. And though Mr. Bezos said in an interview that Amazon engineers drove the design of the gadget, people familiar with the device said the company outsourced some of the design and manufacturing to an Asian manufacturer.

Mr. Bezos said his tablet strategy was about more than selling gadgets. "Well, you can call it a tablet if you want. I call it a service," he said. A piece of that service is this hardware, and "the service is that deep integration with that content and that media," he said.

Journal Community

Amazon Unveils 'Kindle Fire'

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EPA

Amazon's Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire.

Amazon didn't let reporters test or touch the Kindle Fire at Wednesday's event, having company handlers show them off instead. The Kindle Fire has a smaller screen and less storage capacity than the iPad and runs Google Inc.'s Android operating system.

Amazon is now taking orders for the device, which ships on Nov. 15.

Amazon has had some success tangling with Apple. Both companies have competed to sell digital products such as MP3 downloads. Earlier this year, Amazon made a splash undercutting Apple's leading iTunes music store by selling the new album from Lady Gaga for just 99 cents.

The Kindle Fire also has a notable advantage over other tablets that have tried to narrow the iPad's lead: Amazon's library of digital content, which its tablet users can access. Customers can pay $79 a year for a service known as Amazon Prime, which gives them access to 11,000 movies and TV shows, as well as unlimited two-day shipping for physical goods purchased on Amazon.com. Amazon also sells single movies, TV shows and music songs, with a catalog that competes with that of Apple's iTunes store.

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European Pressphoto Agency

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows off the new Kindle Fire tablet Wednesday. The device will be priced at $199.

Analysts said the tablet could boost Amazon's revenue because the device makes it easy to buy both physical goods and digital goods, such as books, music and videos, on Amazon.com.

More

• Live Blog Recap: Kindle Fire Launch
• Video: Kindle Price Points
• Heard on the Street: Amazon Plays With Fire
• First Impressions Trickle In
• Amazon to Collect California Tax
• Magazines Climb on Kindle Fire's Wagon

Still, some speculate that Amazon won't be making much, if any, money from the Fire. But UBM TechInsights, which calculates the cost to build devices, said a preliminary estimate of the components in the Fire likely totaled about $150, netting Amazon a profit of about $50 a tablet.

Amazon's shares rose $5.50, or 2.5%, to $229.71 Wednesday.

"Consumers want email, Web access, games, video and music, and that's exactly what Amazon is delivering for a very reasonable price," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. "The Kindle Fire is all the tablet that most consumers will need."

At the Wednesday event, Mr. Bezos also introduced two new versions of the black-and-white Kindles. The entry level one costs $79, while one with a touch screen costs $99. Both come with advertising on the home screen and on the screensaver; the ad-free version of the Kindles cost at least $30 more.

Book publishers said they expected the new black-and-white Kindles and the Kindle Fire to boost e-book sales, particularly after the holidays. Before the original Kindle launched, the fledgling e-book business had lost traction and had largely been written off by the publishing community.

Today some major publishers say e-books are 15% to 20% of revenue, and as much as 50% or more of sales on certain commercial fiction titles.

"What we saw today is really going to drive the adoption curve in the U.S.," said Maja Thomas, senior vice president of Hachette Digital, a unit of Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group.

Added Jane Friedman, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media Inc., a digital publisher, "Some will continue to want a pure e-reader. But the Kindle Fire is... much more than I expected, and it's going to be great for my company."

Amazon still faces the delicate task of promoting its tablet at the same time as its Kindle e-readers.

Some analysts said that the tablet—on which people can read e-books—might cannibalize sales of the dedicated e-readers. Amazon executives, however, played down those concerns.

"People are going to choose different devices for different content," said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon's Kindle vice president. They would choose the tablet for children's books, comic books and graphic novels, while opting for the black-and-white reader for bigger novels and biographies, he said.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576598670632549928.html#ixzz1ZIUyNVD1