Amazon drops price on Kindle. Again.

Amazon slashes the price on the top-selling Kindle to $259. Why? Because the Barnes and Noble Nook is closing in.

In a move designed to bring the Kindle in line with the Barnes and Noble Nook, Amazon today quietly dropped the price on the international edition of its popular e-reader. At the same time, the company consolidated the line of 6-inch Kindles into one world edition, which will sell for $259 – the same price point as the Nook.

Amazon said it will debit the accounts of consumers who bought the international Kindle for $279. "You don’t need to do anything to get the lower price – we are automatically issuing you a $20 refund," the company wrote in a message posted on Amazon.com.

As we noted earlier today, Amazon will soon begin opening up its Kindle books to PC users. The Kindle PC program will purportedly synchronize "your last page read and annotations between devices with Whispersync,” Amazon says. The program is available for pre-order now.

Like the price drop on the 6-inch Kindle, the announcement of the PC program was widely viewed by tech bloggers as an attempt to fight back advances from Amazon competitors. The Sony Reader already allows users interconnectivity, for instance. So does – yep, you guessed it – the Barnes and Noble Nook.

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