Amazon Kindle in the context of Computing platform

An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

In the 2000s, there was a trend of print and e-book sales moving to the Internet, where readers buy traditional paper books and e-books on websites using e-commerce systems. With print books, readers are increasingly browsing through images of the covers of books on publisher or bookstore websites and selecting and ordering titles online. The paper books are then delivered to the reader by mail or any other delivery service. With e-books, users can browse through titles online, select and order titles, then the e-book can be sent to them online or the user can download the e-book. By the early 2010s, e-books had begun to overtake hardcover by overall publication figures in the U.S.

An e-reader, also called an e reader or e device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals.

Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-reader; however, specialized e-reader devices may optimize portability, readability, and battery life for this purpose. Their main advantage over printed books is portability: an e-reader is capable of storing thousands of books while weighing less than a single one. Another advantage is the convenience provided by add-on features.

Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, the company originally started as an online marketplace for books, but gradually expanded its offerings to include a wide range of product categories, referred to as "The Everything Store". Amazon has been described as a Big Tech company.

The company has multiple subsidiaries, including Amazon Web Services (or AWS), providing cloud computing; Zoox, a self-driving car division; Kuiper Systems, a satellite Internet provider; and Amazon Lab126, a computer hardware R&D provider. Other subsidiaries include Ring, Twitch, IMDb, and Whole Foods Market. Its acquisition of Whole Foods in August 2017 for US$13.4 billion substantially increased its market share and presence as a physical retailer. Amazon also distributes a variety of downloadable and streaming content through its Amazon Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch, Audible and Wondery units. It publishes books through its publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, produces and distributes film and television content through Amazon MGM Studios, including the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio it acquired in March 2022, and owns Brilliance Audio and Audible, which produce and distribute audiobooks, respectively. Amazon also produces consumer electronics—most notably, Kindle e-readers, Echo devices, Fire tablets, and Fire TVs.

WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, Nintendo consoles starting with the 3DS Internet Browser, GNOME Web, and the discontinued BlackBerry Browser.

WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome under the name Blink. Since version 15 in May 2013, Opera web browser has dropped its own Presto layout engine in favor of WebKit as implemented by Google in the Chromium project.

Amazon Lab126 (sometimes known as Lab126) is an American research and development and computer hardware company owned by Amazon.com. It was founded in 2004 by Gregg Zehr, previously Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Palm, and is based in Sunnyvale, California. It is widely known for developing Amazon's Kindle line of e-readers and tablets.

Amazon Echo, often shortened to Echo, is a brand of smart speakers developed by Amazon. Echo devices connect to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service, Alexa, which responds to a wake term (Alexa, and others) when spoken by its user. The features of the device include voice interaction, audio program playback, such as music, streaming podcasts, and audiobooks, maintaining to-do lists, alarms, and scheduling reminders, in addition to providing weather, traffic and other real-time information. It can also control several smart devices, acting as a home automation hub.

Amazon started developing Echo devices inside its Lab126 offices in Silicon Valley and in Cambridge, Massachusetts as early as 2010. The device represented one of its first attempts to expand its device portfolio beyond the Kindle e-reader.

The Amazon Fire, formerly called the Kindle Fire, is a line of tablet computers developed by Amazon. Built with Quanta Computer, the Kindle Fire was first released in November 2011, featuring a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS technology and running on Fire OS, an Android-based operating system. The Kindle Fire HD followed in September 2012, and the Kindle Fire HDX in September 2013. In September 2014, when the fourth generation was introduced, the name "Kindle" was dropped. In later generations, the Fire tablet is also able to convert into a Smart speaker turning on the "Show Mode" options, which the primary interaction will be by voice command through Alexa.

OpenStax (formerly OpenStax College) is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, which are available as free downloadable PDFs, web versions, audiobooks and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, it was announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.

Aiming to compete with major publishers' offerings, the project was initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Michelson 20 Million Minds Foundation, and the Maxfield Foundation. All textbook content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Licenses; specifically, the books are available under the CC BY license (except for Calculus, which is available under CC BY-NC-SA), which means that instructors are able to use, adapt, and remix the content, as long as they attribute OpenStax.

ACCESS CO., LTD. (株式会社ACCESS, Kabushiki-gaisha Akusesu), founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in Tokyo, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa, is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, video game consoles and set top boxes.

The company makes the NetFront software series, which has been deployed in over 1 billion devices, representing over 2,000 models, as of the end of January 2011, and which has been used as a principal element of the widely successful i-mode data service of NTT DoCoMo in Japan. NetFront is also used by many consumer electronic devices beyond mobile phones, such as the Sony PSP and the Amazon Kindle, both of which have their web browsers powered by NetFront. In addition, the NetFront Browser and related products are used on a wide variety of mobile phones, including those from Nokia, Samsung, LG Corp., Motorola, Sony Ericsson and others.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (鴻海精密工業股份有限公司), doing business as Hon Hai Technology Group (鴻海科技集團) in Taiwan, Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集团) in China, and Foxconn (富士康) internationally, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer established in 1974 with headquarters in Tucheng District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. In 2023, the company's annual revenue reached 6.16 trillion New Taiwan dollars (equivalent to US$198.533 billion in 2024) and was ranked 20th in the 2023 Fortune Global 500. It is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics. While headquartered in Taiwan, the company earns the majority of its revenue from assets in China and is one of the largest employers worldwide. Terry Gou is the company founder and former chairman.

Foxconn manufactures electronic products for major American, Canadian, Chinese, Finnish, and Japanese companies. Notable products manufactured by Foxconn include the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, all Nintendo gaming systems since the GameCube, Nintendo DS models, Sega models, Nokia devices, Cisco products, Sony devices (including most PlayStation gaming consoles), Google Pixel devices, Xiaomi devices, every successor to Microsoft's Xbox console, and several CPU sockets, including the TR4 CPU socket on some motherboards. As of 2012, Foxconn factories manufactured an estimated 40% of all consumer electronics sold worldwide.

The Kindle Store is an online e-book e-commerce store operated by Amazon as part of its retail website and can be accessed from any Amazon Kindle, Fire tablet, or Kindle mobile app. At the launch of the Kindle in November 2007, the store had more than 88,000 digital titles available in the U.S. store. This number increased to more than 275,000 by late 2008 and exceeded 765,000 by August 2011. In July 2014, there were over 2.7 million titles available. As of March 2018, there are over six million titles available in the U.S. Content from the store is purchased online and downloaded using either Wi-Fi or Amazon's Whispernet to bring the content to the user's device. One of the innovations Amazon brought to the store was one-click purchasing which allowed users to quickly purchase an e-book. The Kindle Store uses a recommendation engine that looks at purchase history, browsing history, and reading activity, and then suggests material it thinks the user will like.