Amazon’s Kindle 2, which first shipped in late February, is selling at roughly double the rate of the first generation device, says a source close to Amazon. Approximately 300,000 of the Kindle 2s have been shipped to date, suggesting Amazon has made over $100 million in revenue from sales of the $359 device alone this year.

The first generation device sold around 400,000 units total over its lifespan, we’ve heard, although one estimate by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put it as high as 500,000 based on a surge in sales in Q3 2007. Amazon expects to sell 800,000 or so of the Kindle 2 devices in 2009, or double the volume of the first generation device.

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Amazon began taking preorders of its Kindle 2 e-book reader on February 9, and a month later, it’s still one of the most talked-about tech gadgets. The second-generation Kindle doesn’t disappoint, either: it has an improved screen, a better button layout, a wider selection of e-books, and the (highly debated) text-to-speech capability. There’s even a way to view Kindle books on your iPhone now. And let’s not forget the rumored touch-screen Kindle 3 in the works. Let’s all blame Oprah for the national Kindle hysteria!

If all the excitement has made you reach for your wallet to snag the $359 device, then you’ve probably noticed that Amazon forgot to include a little something in the box: a protective book cover! That’s no mistake, folks. Although Amazon’s first-generation Kindle included a book cover, the retailer decided to ship the next model without one. But don’t fret— most Kindle owners complained about that flimsy book cover anyway, and there are lots of cover options available.

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The slimmer, more stylish Kindle 2—or the “Thindle,” as I immediately dubbed it in a post-announcement tweet—is everything that the first Kindle should have been. In addition to being more svelte, it has a sharper screen, a 25 percent longer battery life and at $359, sells for the same price as Amazon’s original year-old version. While it undeniably takes the e-book genre to a higher level, it remains unclear whether the Thindle can be a mass hit. Millions have taken to digitally downloading music, movies and photographs, but e-books have failed to find a similar following.

Until recently, there were good reasons for that. A few years ago I read parts of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” on my Palm PDA. The novelty wore off quickly. When presented with text on a screen—whether it’s a mobile phone, a handheld or a computer—my eyes dart and wander rather than scan and savor, a tendency that doesn’t lend itself to the patience that book reading requires. I heard a similar story from James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “I read my first e-Book in 1997 on a Psion series 5,” McQuivey says. “It was a black and white computer. It ran on AA batteries. All it had were public domain books. The low contrast of the device meant that you needed to be in good light.”

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Amazon’s Kindle 2 is sleek, stylish, and has a crisp and easy-on-the eyes “electronic ink” display. But it only does one thing — read books.

After all the relatively hostile things I have said about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader in the past, I didn’t actually expect that the company’s official PR firm, Outcast, would actually send me one to play with. In Mid-March, they contacted me to inform me that they were going to loan me one for ten days, after which I had to send it back, this due to the extreme demand for review units. Ouch! The first Kindle I looked at, I had 30 days to play with the device.

Of course, I was literally on the bottom of their list to receive one, no doubt due to my less-than-warm opinions of their product that were expressed during the launch and the actual release timeframe. Our gallant Editor-In-Chief, Larry Dignan, got one first at the end of February, along with the other “Tier 1″ consumer electronics writers like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue who had their widely-publicized reviews published weeks ago. I think Larry took one look at it and put it on the shelf and gave it a thorough ZDNet Labs (TM) dust accumulation benchmark before sending it back. Gee, thanks boss.

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Welcome to KrunchGear’s Kindle 2 Dekontainment, a video in which we unbox the Kindle 2 and show off some of its various and sundry features. Here are our initial photos including the Kindle Kover (k) which is konsiderably better than the original cover. This one actually snaps into the Kindle and can’t fall off.

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By now you’ve probably read all of the reviews of the Kindle 2. We also posted our own first look, video unboxing, and commentary on the state of e-books in general.

Now that we’ve had a week with the Kindle 2, we thought it was about time that we weighed in officially on the Kindle 2 as a platform for acquiring, converting, delivering, and reading e-Book type content. Below we’ve highlighted a few of our favorite features, and taken a closer look at some of the most talked about elements of the Kindle 2.

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Amazon’s [AMZN] new Kindle 2, shipping this week, shames the original Kindle with a host of improvements: better enclosure, faster page-turns, a better Web experience and seven times the memory. But the Kindle 2 is put to shame by the someday-Kindle 3, which exists, for now, only in our collective imagination.

Don’t get me wrong; the $360 Kindle 2 is cool. Very cool. But not yet cool enough for the price. In fact, if anything, the Kindle 2 has made me more inclined to buy the original Kindle at its new discounted price of $220.

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Critical design changes make the Amazon Kindle 2 more appealing than the preceding model - but while Amazon has succeeded in enhancing its e-book reader, it has done little to advance the device to the next stage.

The first-generation Amazon Kindle weighed 0.29kg and offered a paperlike E-Ink display that keeps eyestrain at bay (as compared with the backlit displays of mobile phones and other mobile devices). The first Kindle was readable in sunlight; it also offered long battery life and allowed you to look up words on the fly, as well as to take notes and highlight passages at will.

The Amazon Kindle 2 retains all of those capabilities, in a slimmer form (it’s 9mm thin). We like the thinner profile: the new device feels better in your hands, and we think it will be easier to pack. At just 0.28kg, the device’s weight is virtually the same as before.

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Amazon’s Kindle 2 is cool and all but it’s a recession, dude.

The Kindle 2 is Amazon’s latest effort at repooling their talents and attempting to make their first Kindle a bit more realistic. They approached the task with a fervor reminiscent of a certain electronics manufacturer named after a popular fruit, that shall remain nameless. The device that was produced after those laborious efforts came together was the Kindle 2, the latest and greatest in e-reader technology.

The Kindle 2 is thinner than the original at just over a 1/3 of an inch, comparable to most magazines. This is both nice, and a bit of a worry factor. You hold the unit thinking that a swift movement will snap it in half, yet you’re mind is boggled by the features this little sliver of plastic is delivering. The Kindle 2 features an updated system of wireless information transfer, jumping on the 3G bandwagon you can now download books from Kindle anytime, anywhere with no monthly fees, service plans, or Wi-Fi hotspots necessary.

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Last time Jeff Bezos was in the building, we were chatting with him about the Kindle — the first version of the Kindle, which kind of doesn’t count. He was talking about how, for the last twenty years, the momentum of technological change has all headed in the direction of shortening attention spans, destroying the impulse for leisurely consumption, obviating the possibility of contemplation. We’re paraphrasing a bit, but that was the gist. Bezos continued, saying that he believes the technological pendulum will begin to swing back, that devices like his Kindle will, for some significant portion of the population, reverse that momentum. And in the cases of the few hundred thousand who have owned the Kindle for a while, that is clearly happening. The people we know who own Kindles read more books than they did in the recent past. They consume a variety of traditional media on Bezos’s original device, despite the fact that it was pretty crude, really limited.

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