Kindle is a portable electronic device that allows consumers to read e-books. It’s been produced by e-commerce leader Amazon since November, 2007, experiencing a huge, ever-growing popularity from the start. Such success can be explained by several factors.

The primary origin of Kindle’s popularity can be easily traced back to Amazon’s own success. Amazon’s gigantic consumer base trusts the company, hence being naturally prone to buy its products.

Secondly, Amazon is one of the world’s main bookstores ever. Considering that a vast portion of Amazon’s clientele is interested in reading, offering an e-book reader like Kindle just makes sense. Kindle certainly appeals to that part of the public who looks for electronic alternatives to traditional print books.

Reading e-books on a computer screen isn’t normally the most pleasing of tasks. Computers aren’t portable and their screens aren’t suitable to long reading periods. Kindle has been designed to solve these issues. It is small and portable, and its screen actually is an electronic paper display, which makes for a more comfortable experience for readers.

Notebooks are sometimes mentioned as possible alternatives to Kindle, due to their portability. The problem is that notebooks aren’t nearly as compact as Kindle; thus the latter is much more practical as an e-book reading device.

With this increasing interest in green issues, Kindle has a special appeal for concerned consumers. They tend to favor e-books over their print counterparts because the former are environment-friendly, since companies don’t have to cut any trees to produce them. Consequently, green-oriented book buyers have all the more reasons to make use of Kindle.

For those who purchase books on a regular basis, storage is a major concern, because it takes a lot of physical room to keep print books. With Kindle, book storage is a much less complicated process. After all, e-books can only take up virtual space. Besides, it is easy to download books from Amazon straight into Kindle’s memory.

AZW is the name of Kindle’s own proprietary format and e-books sold by Amazon are released as AZW files. Nevertheless, consumers can also use Kindle to load content produced in plain text. Moreover, Amazon offers an e-mail service that allows Kindle users to convert files from various formats (HTML, PDF, DOC, among others) to AZW. Audio books and MP3 audio files can be transferred to Kindle as well.

Given the many advantages that Kindle offers to e-book buyers, its popularity is perfectly justified. Kindle will probably become even more popular as new versions are released by Amazon.