Tag Archives | Amazon Kindle

E-Reader Price Wars: Kobo Tries to Keep Up

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 31, 2010 at 8:33 am

When cool products cost a lot of money, there’s plenty of opportunity for other manufacturers to introduce less-cool competitors–or ones with fewer features, at least–at lower prices. But what happens when the cool products get radically cheaper? We’re seeing that entertaining scenario play out in the e-reader market.

When bookstore behemoth Borders announced in March it would start selling a basic reader called the Kobo for $150, it was $110 less than the Kindle and Nook. And even though it didn’t have a 3G connection–it made you buy books on a computer and sync them via USB–it was a deal.

But then Barnes & Noble set off e-readers price wars by cutting the price of the Nook from $259 to $199 and introducing a $149 Wi-Fi-only model. Amazon knocked the Kindle’s price down to $189 a few hours later–and last week, it shipped the third-generation Kindle in both a $189 3G model and a $139 Wi-Fi only one.

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New Kindle is Here, Selling Like an Unspecified Number of Hotcakes

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 25, 2010 at 8:17 am

Amazon has announced that it’s started shipping its third-generation Kindle e-reader to customers.The new version is thinner and lighter, with a better screen and longer battery life, and it now starts at $139 (for a Wi-Fi version). Basically, it’s the most Kindle-like Kindle yet, rather than an iPad wannabee. I’m looking forward to seeing one in person.

In Apple-like fashion, Amazon likes to crow about how well the Kindle is selling. But unlike Apple, which frequently quotes sales stats in millions or billions, Amazon has never said how many Kindles it’s sold.

So the company always brags in a vague, self-referential way, which it’s doing today:

Amazon.com today announced that more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch, making the new Kindles the fastest-selling ever.  In addition, in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles  on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com.

Amazon long ago dedicated the best real estate on its site–the top of its homepage–exclusively to Kindle hype. So it would be astonishing if it wasn’t the best settling product on the site. And with the repeated price cuts the e-reader gotten, it’s not surprising that sales continue to increase.

There’s no doubt that the Kindle is an important product and a hit for Amazon, but unless the company discloses actual figures someday, you’ve got to wonder: Does it choose not to get specific because it worries that hard numbers would provoke a spate of “E-readers are still a tiny market compared to the iPod and other landmark gizmos” stories?

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E-Readers are Dead. Long Love E-Reading!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 16, 2010 at 12:46 pm

Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes is noting that the explosion of new e-readers that seemed to be coming this year has turned out to be more of a whimper than a bang. Plastic Logic’s Que ProReader is dead, Hearst’s Skiff reader shows no signs of life, Samsung’s E-Ink reader is apparently skipping the US market, and none of the umpteen readers from lesser-known companies has become a breakout hit.

Still in the game: Amazon’s Kindle (the e-reader that’s synonymous with e-readers), Barnes & Noble’s Nook (which B&N is about to double down on), and Sony’s Reader (the first modern e-reader). Oh, and there’s Kobo, the Canadian e-reader backed by Borders. I don’t see any of these going away anytime soon–actually, as Slate’s Farhad Manjoo points out, the likely scenario is that they’ll get even cheaper and sell even better.

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Kindle Gets a Couple Free Games

Posted by Jared Newman on August 5, 2010 at 9:42 am

The Kindle’s software development kit has been largely forgotten since Amazon announced it in January, because nothing ever came of the supposed iPad counter-measure.

At last, the Kindle Development Kit has yielded two free games: Every Word challenges players to come up with as many words as possible from a scrambled concoction of letters, and Shuffled Row is like a solitary Scrabble, in which letters are replaced whenever the player uses them to create words.

Obviously, this isn’t Doom for Kindle (though I have seen video of Super Mario Bros. running on a Kindle software emulator, riddled with bugs). It’s more of an answer to Barnes & Noble, which stocks the Nook with Chess and Sudoku.

Amazon tells ZDNet that it’s still working with “limited-beta developers” and says to stay tuned for more developments, but over the last seven months I’ve grown apathetic about the whole thing. The Kindle Development Kit was exciting in the run-up to Apple’s iPad debut (remember when we only knew it as “the tablet?”), when it seemed like a desperate attempt to add new uses to an ultimately single-purpose device.

Now, Amazon appears to have embraced the Kindle’s non-iPadness, with an emphasis on a better screen and faster response in the third-generation model instead of a longer feature list. And with the Kindle Wi-Fi’s $139 price tag, comparisons to the iPad just don’t seem all that appropriate anymore.

I’m happy to see the Kindle get a couple games, and I hope we see more apps soon, like the once-promised Zagat dining guide. But getting apps out there no longer seems as urgent as it did when the Kindle Development Kit debuted.

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New Amazon Kindle: Even Kindle-ier and Less IPaddish

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 28, 2010 at 7:24 pm

What should the next-generation Kindle be like? Like the current Kindle, only more so. That’s clearly Amazon.com’s strategy, judging from the news about the new Kindle which first broke tonight on Engadget.
In the wake of the iPad, Amazon could choose from several obvious potential strategies for the future of its e-reader. The one it’s chosen, at least for now, is to focus on reading–and to move away from the iPad rather than towards it, by making the Kindle smaller, lighter, and more affordable.

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Amazon Runs Out of Kindles

Posted by Jared Newman on July 27, 2010 at 4:48 pm

Talk about bad timing. On the same day Amazon boasted the first author to sell one million Kindle books, the stock of Kindle e-readers dried up.

The basic second-generation Kindle is listed as “Temporarily out of stock” at Amazon, with no estimated ship date. If the jumbo Kindle DX’s prominent display on Amazon’s home page is any indication, the retailer is aware that there are no second-generation Kindles left. (If you absolutely must have one, there’s a refurbished model for $170.)

So now it’s time to bring out the theories. As SlashGear notes, there was that rumor from Bloomberg of a third-generation Kindle, supposedly due in August. It will be thinner, with a more responsive screen and sharper display, Bloomberg’s unnamed sources said, but without a touch screen or color.

We’re coming up on August, and the sudden Kindle disappearance fits Amazon’s profile. A few months before Amazon debuted the Kindle 2 in February 2009, first-generation models disappeared. If a new Kindle is coming, I wouldn’t expect such a long delay this time. The market is too competitive for Amazon to miss months of sales, and I’m sure Amazon has a better handle on manufacturing now than it did two years ago.

It’s foolish to rule out some unusual supply glitch, in which case everything should go back to normal soon, but Amazon could use a Kindle refresh either way. The retailer promotes the Kindle as being easy to hold and easy to read outdoors — by comparison, Apple’s iPad is neither — so a thinner, better-looking Kindle would build nicely on that marketing hook. My guess is that Amazon’s early boasts about book sales are building up to a grand announcement of Kindle 3, so maybe the timing’s not so bad after all.

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Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcovers

Posted by Jared Newman on July 19, 2010 at 4:18 pm

Say what you will about the tactile pleasure of a hardcover book, but Amazon customers are choosing to read on their Kindles.

For every 100 hardcover books Amazon sold over the last three months, the retailer sold 143 Kindle books. In the last month, the pace has jumped to 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers. Kindle book sales have tripled in the first half of 2010, compared to the same period last year.

Keep in mind that Amazon isn’t talking about paperbacks, so I’m assuming those still outsell e-books. But Amazon also counts hardcovers even if there isn’t a Kindle edition, and doesn’t count free, out-of-copyright Kindle books.

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos says the rise in Kindle books over hardcovers is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.” I say it’s more astounding given that anyone can purchase a hardcover from Amazon, but only Kindle owners or Kindle software users have use for an e-book.

I hope book publishers are encouraged, not frightened, by the news. They should be converting books into electronic form faster than ever to capitalize on the e-reader craze. But they might also liken e-books to paperbacks — both are less profitable than hardcovers — by delaying the digital versions to drum up hardcover sales.

Delaying the digital version of books is a bad move because there’s nothing comparable to hardcovers available in digital form. If publishers want to charge more for new releases — and they can with the agency model, which allows several major publishers to set their own e-book prices — that’s fine. But as Amazon’s latest numbers show, Kindle owners are determined to build their e-book libraries, and publishers should do everything they can not to hold those readers back.

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The Big Kindle Gets Better and Cheaper

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 1, 2010 at 10:13 am

A little over a year ago, Amazon.com released the Kindle DX–an e-reader with a big 9.7″ display and a big $489 pricetag. The DX hasn’t changed since then, but the world around it sure has. For one thing, the price premium over the smaller Kindle keeps growing–it started out costing $130 more, but last month’s Kindle price cut left the DX costing $300 more than the little guy. Oh, and the DX cost only $10 less than the cheapest version of the similarly-sized, far more colorful and versatile iPad.

Now the Kindle DX is evolving to reflect the e-book landscape as of mid-2010. Amazon plans to start shipping a new version on July 7th with a graphite-colored-case and an improved E-Ink screen with 50 percent better contrast. I’ve always had issues with the E-Ink displays on Kindles and other devices: For all their power-efficient, non-reflective virtues, they’ve always looked like dark gray ink on light gray paper…sort of like a poorly-printed paperback on cheapo newsprint. So I’m curious to see how much better the new DX screen is at doing the thing that Amazon has always claimed Kindle displays do: read like real paper.

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