Thursday, October 8, 2009

Kindling Skepticism

Link to October 8 minonline post, "Analysis: Kindle’s Too-Little-Too-Late Sale".

Excerpt: Just in time for holiday shopping and a wave of upcoming competition, Amazon lowered the price of its Kindle e-book reader yesterday to the still unreasonable price of $259 from its previous $299. A new international wireless edition is available for $20 more. Too bad it won’t matter. Amazon missed its chance to be the iPhone of the e-reader world. It helped legitimize a new technology category without sealing the deal with consumers or publishers.

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos crows that “the Kindle is the most wished for, the most gifted and the No. 1 best-selling product across the millions of items we sell on Amazon.” Curiously, the company has never been forthcoming about the actual number of Kindles sold. The company likes to talk around the topic by hinting at the high percentage of e-books it sells into the platform. And that is an interesting point to pursue. If Amazon is succeeding in selling so many books to users via this platform, then why is the base cost of the device still too high?

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