Your Move, Amazon
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 10:58 am
One of the many interesting questions raised by the iPad is this: What’s Amazon gonna do? I hope that it’ll shortly unveil a clever new Kindle of some sort–clever new products are always more interesting than price reductions–but lowering the cost of the current model to $149 also sounds like it would be a rational response…
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April 1st, 2010 at 1:42 pm
You’re right, Harry. Amazon will have to do something to sell Kindles at rates they have been, but they may be okay selling books and ebooks regardless. Many think the price will lower and the next Kindle version will have more abilities. That’s the word in the Kindle forums anyway.
http://ebooksuccess4free.wordpress.com
April 1st, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Killing the Kindle would be the best thing for the Kindle store. By the end of the first quarter of iPad sales, there will be more iPads in the world than Kindle devices. There are already more users of Kindle.app on iPhone and iPod touch than there are Kindle devices. The full-color, video-enabled eBook readers (Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) number about 1.5 billion while the grayscale readers have not reached 5 million yet. The future of eBooks is not to be printed on virtual toilet tissue, but rather to be printed on virtual full-color glossy stock. Amazon needs to focus on selling books. They lose money on eBooks to sell Kindles and yet have sold hardly any Kindles.
The mission of Kindle was to get the eBook market started. Mission accomplished. Now we need to get the books all converted to digital. Not in proprietary Kindle format to be abused on an eInk screen, but the color masters of all the books need to be converted to a standard format for any reader with a color screen. Most of the bookstore is in color, it’s more than just romance novels and sci-fi (great as those are) and the 5 DVD Photoshop learning package you bought from Scott Kelby is just a video book. You want to be able to sit it next to your computer on iPad as you learn, same as you would use a Photoshop learning paper book.
When you look to the future of the Kindle device it is even more grim than today. The CEO of the company that makes the eInk screen said they’ll have a color screen for Kindle by the end of 2011, and that it won’t be quite as clear or sharp as the gray one, and it won’t support video. By end of 2011, Kindle won’t be able to run 50% or more of the eBooks that are available, and will have an installed base maybe 5% of iPad.
When you consider that Amazon also sells netbooks and iPods and Macs and PC’s and soon iPads, Amazon can kill the Kindle and still sell you a device and a bunch of books for it. Kindle is like a boat anchor in that setup.
April 1st, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Amazon did not have to lose the iPad eReader battle, but I think it’s inevitable now. They wasted their time on silly things and fumbled the opportunity. Now they’ll be late to the iPad with Kindle, and the buying experience won’t be near as good as the iBookstore.
http://thesmallwave.com/apple-preparing-for-great-ebook-experience-am