How's this for a coincidence? A day before it rolls out a new version of its Kindle electronic reader, Amazon.com has been awarded a Kindle-related patent filed more than three years ago. The patent, for "ornamental design for an electronic media reader," provides an intriguing glimpse of what amounts to a draft of the original Kindle.
The patent, D591,741, was awarded today, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. InformationWeek, which first ran across the notice, calls it "a design patent which protects the look and feel of the Kindle shell, not for fundamental technologies." It lists Symon Whitehorn and Gregg Zehr as inventors. The patent application was initially filed on March 29, 2006.
Amazon unveiled its original Kindle in November 2007, and followed that up with Kindle 2 in February of this year. The company is widely expected to announce yet another Kindle tomorrow -- this time with a larger screen and other features tailored for reading newspapers and magazines, and college textbooks.
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