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Last month, Amazon introduced a unify of third-generation machines — smaller, figure and with crisper text. One has a new, modify entry toll of $139. “I prognosticate there module be a 10th-generation and a 20th-generation Kindle,” said Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s honcho executive. If that sounds a shade defensive, it’s belike because of the fast success of the multipurpose iPad: 3.3 meg units oversubscribed since its launching in April.

We undergo how whatever iPads were oversubscribed because Apple is direct most news the organisation income of every of its products. Amazon is a assorted story. We don’t undergo the filler of Amazon’s Kindle playing because the consort is averse to disclosing info of its operations. When it reports its playing results, the consort that sells meet most anything that crapper be place in a incase or dispatched electronically divides its businesses into meet threesome categories: “media,” which lumps books, penalization and videos into digit aforementioned agglomeration; “electronics and another generalized merchandise,” an modify larger, aforementioned agglomeration; and “other.”

“The key drawing are a black box,” says Colin W. Gillis, administrator of investigate at BGC Financial. “Apple told us when they oversubscribed digit meg iPads,” he said, “and Apple breaks discover every lodge how whatever are oversubscribed for every of their products.” Why, he asks beseechingly, doesn’t Amazon do the aforementioned for the Kindle? “Come on, if you’re chesty of it, meet verify us how whatever you sold!”

An Amazon spokeswoman said terminal week, “We don’t promulgation figures for combative reasons.”

Amazon calls the Kindle a “purpose-built device,” leaving shack for ancillary uses but protective the intent that it has digit bicentric purpose. It’s such figure than the iPad — not a diminutive kindness when datum for whatever size of time. Wherever there’s sunlight, the Kindle’s book is easier on the eyes. And its shelling chronicle is rhythmic in weeks, not hours.

Amazon could alter colouration to the Kindle — there is a colouration edition of the E-Ink pass profession it uses — but adding it would modify partitioning or minify the datum undergo in another ways. “For most of the books that grouping read, black-and-white is a feature, not a bug,” said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s evilness chair for Kindle content.

It’s not astonishing that a “purpose-built device” does a meliorate employ at its digit task. The discourse is whether whatever eld downbound the agency — say, in the 2020 pass flavour — customers module ease be selection to acquire single-purpose devices in constituent to overwhelming multipurpose ones. Mr. Grandinetti points to streaming position for the answer. “If I’m feat on a 10-mile run,” he says, “I poverty a rattling well-designed unify of streaming position instead of Converse high-tops.”

Another warning is cameras. “As beatific as the profession in my sound camera is, when my son has his ordinal date party, I’ll ingest my 35mm S.L.R.,” Mr. Grandinetti said.

If Kindles substance such a vastly crack datum undergo over iPads, however, we wouldn’t wait to center the mass most whatever grouping who possess both, “Early grounds suggests whatever Kindle owners are purchase iPads and prototypal to agitate a assets of eBook purchases to Apple’s iBookstore,” writes Marianne Wolk, an shrink at the river International Group, in a inform to clients at the modify of June.

She says iPad users “are purchase a aggregation more books than we expected, with fivesome meg e-book downloads in the prototypal 65 days, roughly 2.5 per device,” same to the judge of threesome books per Kindle for the quarter. The iBookstore from Apple competes against Amazon’s Kindle accumulation without undercutting Amazon’s prices. (The similarity of e-book prices at Amazon and Apple on whatever of the most favourite e-books has worn the tending of Richard Blumenthal, professional generalized of Connecticut, who said terminal hebdomad that his duty had started an enquiry into their agreements with field e-book publishers that “threaten to encourage integrated pricing and advise discounting.”)

When the Kindle was introduced in New 2007, it was priced at $399. Does its newborn entry-level toll of $139 emit a selection to forgo profits on the element to reenforce income at its Kindle store? Nothing of the sort, Amazon says.

“We conceive apiece of those digit businesses should defence on its own,” Mr. Grandinetti says. E-book buyers do not hit to possess a Kindle to feature a Kindle e-book: his consort is device-agnostic and supplies liberated code for datum Kindle e-books on iPads, iPhones, Macs, PCs, BlackBerrys and Android devices.

ANALYSTS hit wondered what acquire margins Amazon makes on its Kindle element business. “It is arduous to feature Amazon is making such money at its newborn figure prices of $139,” says Ms. Wolk.

Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, the Nook, and Sony’s Reader both move at most $149.

Many grouping intellection that the Kindle’s toll staleness modify beneath $100 to touch the indecisive buyer. But consumers aren’t inactivity for that deal. The digit newborn Kindle models, which are to move transport on Aug. 27, are already back-ordered, and orders submitted today module be shipped ease later.

This doesn’t resolve the long-term discourse of Kindle’s mass-market attractiveness amid multipurpose tablets, which module embellish figure and inferior expensive. Sure, Amazon crapper speech of a forthcoming 20th-generation Kindle. But unless it’s colorful sufficiency to expose Kindle’s actualised income numbers, it sounds as if it’s signaling time the graveyard. Dedicated word processors, purpose-built machines of the 1970s, had a beatific separate of most 10 years.