Amazon Tablet Tracker: A Timeline of Leaks, Reports, and Non-Denials

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]) is notoriously tight-lipped about the details of its day-to-day business, telling the press and analysts only what it wants them to know. Ever try to find out how many books they’re selling? How quickly certain types of merchandise is moving? Tough luck.

But when it comes to the Seattle e-commerce pioneer’s ambitions to enter the tablet computer market, there’s plenty of chit-chat.

Most of it has leaked out around the edges, although CEO and founder Jeff Bezos definitely added fuel to the fire when, in a rare interview, he told Consumer Reports to “stay tuned” for news about a tablet, and went on to talk about how any such device would be different from the Kindle e-reader.

There’s been more—lots more. To keep track of it all, I’ve used Storify to build this timeline of significant reports about Amazon’s plans for a new tablet device. If the tablet debuts sometime soon, as expected, it will give Amazon time to sell it hard this Christmas shopping season.

I’ll add more stories as they emerge, right up until we see the little guys roaming in the wild. And please let me know if I missed any big entries (there’s a curious lull between Sept. 2010 and this February, for instance.)

You can also find the timeline over at the main Storify site.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.