On February 9, 2009, Amazon announced the Kindle 2, which became available for purchase on February 23, 2009 for the price of $359, and lowered on July 8, 2009 for $299. The new Kindle features improved battery life, 20 percent faster page-refreshing, a text-to-speech option to read the text out loud, and overall thickness reduced from 0.8 to 0.36 inches (9.1 millimetres). The Kindle 2 has 2 GB of internal memory. Amazon estimates that the Kindle 2 will hold about 1500 books. Unlike the original Kindle, Kindle 2 does not have a slot for memory cards. To promote the new Kindle, author Stephen King has made his new book named "UR" only available through Kindle.