The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg prefers to do his e-reading on an iPad. (So do I, most of the time.) And he’s reviewed iPad e-readers: Apples iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
Tag Archives | Amazon.com
Best Buy to Sell Kindle
It’s hard to judge an e-reader without seeing and touching it in person. And Best Buy may be the best place to do that-with the news that it’s going to sell Amazon’s Kindle, it now stocks nearly every major contender.
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Amazon Working on TV Service, Says WSJ
Sounds like Netflix Watch Instantly may get some Amazonian competition soon.
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Rumor: Amazon Wants Netflix-Style Streaming
Amazon reportedly wants to be more like Netflix, with subscription-based streaming of movies and television — if only Hollywood studios would play along.
The Wall Street Journal’s unnamed sources say Amazon has spent weeks, or perhaps months, courting major media companies, including NBC Universal, Viacom and Time Warner. Amazon has proposed all kinds of ideas, including a service bundled with Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited two-day shipping and other perks for $79 per year.
So far, the retailer isn’t getting much traction, the Journal suggests. It’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and Amazon could put the plan on ice or give up entirely if there aren’t enough content providers involved. (Update: WSJ has filled out its story considerably since this post, and the tone isn’t as dreary. There’s no longer any language that says it’s not clear whether any media companies are interested, and instead cites two unnamed media executives who describe the program as a possibility. I’ve removed “Can’t Seal the Deal” from the headline here, since that seems premature.)
Even if studios were more liberal about licensing their content on a subscription basis, Amazon still has another problem: It’s woefully behind Netflix in the race for ubiquity.
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E-Reader Price Wars: Kobo Tries to Keep Up
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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Pogue on the New Kindle
The New York Times’ David Pogue reviews (and likes) the new improved Kindle.
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New Kindle is Here, Selling Like an Unspecified Number of Hotcakes
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!
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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New Amazon Kindle: Even Kindle-ier and Less IPaddish
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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Fifteen Years of Amazon (and Eleven and a Half Years of Amazon and Me)
According to Esquire, today marks the fifteenth anniversary of Amazon.com’s first sale. (Wikipedia says the first customer bought a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, a book which Amazon still sells–hey, it’s even available in a Kindle edition.)
Esquire is marking the anniversary with a slideshow that pays tribute to a dozen e-commerce sites that didn’t make quite as big an impact as Amazon. (Poor Beenz is always in these retrospectives, but Flooz escaped this time around.)
Me, I thought back to the first time I bought anything from what was to become the Web’s biggest merchant. When you log into your Amazon account, you can get a very, very thorough recap of your past purchases. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’ll show you everything you ever bought, back to the very first item.