The Amazon Kindle reader has been an enormous success for Amazon since it was originally launched in November of 2007. The upgrade Kindle 2.0, released in February 2009 was a huge influence in the rapid growth and development of the e-book reader market and the new Kindle 3 reader, unveiled at the end of July 2010, has been selling faster than ever.

Amazon have advised that the new Kindle 3 has been selling faster than any earlier Kindle did during the equivalent post launch time slot. It’s a very different scenario to the widely forecast death of the Kindle that so many industry watchers were anticipating following the Apple iPad’s appearance on the scene.

It’s a compliment to the Kindle – albeit a backhanded one – that, until now, its only realistic competition has come in the form of a multi-functional tablet computer which costs over three times the price of the Kindle. If Amazon to increase the Kindle price by a factor of three, it seems fair to assume that some additional features could probably be added.

However, that seems to be an unlikely course of events. The Kindle has set its stall out as a specialist e-book reader. The iPad is a versatile device. They are two totally different kinds of gadget aimed at different market sectors. A side by side technical comparison is likely to be a fruitless endeavour.

Even so, it’s interesting to see that there are now games being made available for the Kindle. Apple’s iPad is clearly far and away the better device for playing games on – the Kindle’s e-ink technology display, whilst ideal for an e-book reader, is not suited for any application which requires a rapid screen refresh rate.

So it should come as no great surprise that the types of games appearing for the Kindle are mainly numbers games and word puzzles. Right now, Scrabble is the most popular Kindle game. Other options include Sudoku, crosswords and general word puzzles. So we’re not talking about Grand Theft Auto or even Super Mario here – but, without wanting to get into stereotypes, it does make some sense that someone who reads a lot could conceivably also enjoy solving word puzzles and doing crosswords.

Scrabble for the Kindle is currently selling for $ 4.99 and is the best selling game for the Kindle at the moment. Other games seem to range from $ 0.99 to $ 4.99. We are even beginning to see some free games appearing, a trend which – if Kindle games develop along the same lines as Kindle Books – will most likely grow in future.