E-readers are coming down in price...or "rolling back" per Wal-Mart speak...In the increasingly crowded world of digital readers the competition is heating up while the profit margin may be shrinking.

Ahhh, don't you just love open competition?

Claire Cain Miller, writing from the San Francisco bureau of the New York Times, reports this on the latest Kindle shot in the e-reader warfare: 

Amazon.comwill introduce two new versions of the Kindlee-reader on Thursday, one for $139, the lowest price yet for the device.

Amazonis hoping to convince even casual readers that they need a digital reading device. By firing another shot in an e-reader price war leading up to the year-end holiday shopping season, the e-commerce giant turned consumer electronics manufacturer is also signaling it intends to do battle with Appleand its iPadas well as the other makers of e-readers like Sonyand Barnes & Noble.

Unlike previous Kindles, the $139 “Kindle Wi-Fi” will connect to the Internet using only Wi-Fi instead of a cellphone network as other Kindles do. Amazon is also introducing a model to replace the Kindle 2, which it will sell for the same price as that model, $189. Both new Kindles are smaller and lighter, with higher contrast screens and crisper text.

“The hardware business for us has been so successful that we’re going to continue,” Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said in an interview at the company’s headquarters. “I predict there will be a 10th-generation and a 20th-generation Kindle. We’re well-situated to be experts in purpose-built reading devices.”

Read more at http://alturl.com/kajnc