Sometime towards the end of the year, the Amazon management team will get together to cast their eyes over 2009's performance. They will, in all probability, be very content - it has been an excellent year for Amazon. A lot of the credit for that must be given to the Amazon Kindle e-book reader - which is now Amazon's top selling product.

Sometime towards the end of the year, the Amazon management team will get together to cast their eyes over 2009's performance. They will, in all probability, be very content - it has been an excellent year for Amazon. A lot of the credit for that must be given to the Amazon Kindle e-book reader - which is now Amazon's top selling product.

The Kindle 2 was released in February 2009. It was widely considered to be a step in the right direction. Amazon had obviously made very good use of the customer feedback it received on the original Kindle, released in November 2007, to drive improvements. The huge choice of Kindle titles and wireless connectivity were retained and longer battery life, increased storage capacity and faster page turns were among the improvements which were incorporated.

Best selling author, Stephen King wrote a special novella to mark the launch and the Kindle 2 rapidly became the "must have" gadget amid a blaze of publicity.

Amazon followed up, just a few months later in June, with the release of the Kindle DX. The large DX screen made it ideal for readers of magazines, newspapers and academic textbooks. Surprisingly, it was the traditional world of academic publishing which generated a lot of publicity for the new DX.

The academic world quickly saw the potential benefits offered by the Kindle. Interactive education - tests and pop quizzes for example - would be possible and it would be very much easier to ensure that textbooks were kept up to date and current. As a result of using electronic books which didn't require paper, academic bodies would not only save money, but be more environmentally friendly as well - two key considerations for such institutions who have both financial budgets and environmental goals to meet nowadays.

As well as establishing partnerships with a number of colleges and universities, Amazon benefited from a lot of publicity generated by political bodies such as the New Democratic Leadership Council and Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger - both of whom waxed lyrical on the educational potential of e-book readers in general and the Amazon Kindle in particular.

As bright as things were looking for Amazon, the first signs of trouble ahead were in evidence. Having seen Amazon developing the e-book reader market, other manufacturers were suddenly aware of the huge growth potential of this nascent sector. A long, and impressive, list of competitors, including companies like Microsoft, Sony, Apple and Barnes and Noble, were now chasing their share - and they all had e-book readers of their own in the development pipeline.

It's a backhanded compliment to Amazon that practically every reader which shows any promise is immediately dubbed the "Kindle Killer". The fact of the matter is however, that despite all the money and time spent on development by the competition, Amazon currently remains the biggest kid in the playground - and by some way. The two biggest threats - Sony's Daily Edition reader and the Nook from Barnes and Noble - have both had their release dates moved back. It begins to look highly probable that Amazon itself could be the most likely producer of the Kindle Killer - the Kindle 4. Could we reasonably expect to see this sometime in 2010?