(Amazon Kindle News) Here are your Kindle News Briefs for January 1, 2010

Kindle Blackberry App Coming Soon
Blackberry owners will be pleased to learn that a new app is coming their way that will allow them, with their Blackberry, to download Kindle books, read Kindle books, and synchronize their Kindle and Blackberry so that bookmarked pages, etc. carry over between devices.

Top 12 Kindle Books are All Free
Amazon.com publishes a regularly updated list of which Kindle books (and non-Kindle books for that matter) are the top sellers. Ironically, the top 12 bestsellers are all free, meaning that neither the publisher or Amazon.com make any money from it. The list includes books like The Crossroads Cafe, Exposure: A Novel, and Dark Pursuit. Many times, giving a book away for free helps promote it and spread word of mouth or “hook” an audience for future books.

Apple’s Tablet Aims to Topple Kindle
According to the Apple Insider, Apple is expected to sell 1.4 million units of its new ebook reader in the first nine months. Apple has been hush about its plans to compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle and hasn’t given any official release date or even confirmed it is working on a tablet project. Apple Insider quoted Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster as saying,

“For purposes of sensitivity, assuming the tablet comes out in March 2010, we believe Apple would sell around 1.4 units at a $600 [average selling price] in 2010. The tablet is not yet included in Street models, so we expect the multiple to expand as tablet hype builds ahead of the announcement, and numbers to go up once the device is announced.”