Sony finally responds to the price chops by Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com with new, lower pricetags for its trio of Reader e-readers.
Tag Archives | Amazon.com
The Big Kindle Gets Better and Cheaper
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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Amazon May Have Lost $9.2 Million in Sales Due to Outage
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some on Tuesday afternoon, visiting Amazon may have been a shock. Its pages were devoid of products, its search functions malfunctioning, its shopping cart unusable. For some unknown reason, one of the web’s largest retailers was out of commission for almost three hours, the longest the site has ever been down for any reason.
The site has yet to specify exactly what happened. But within minutes of the first signs of trouble, thousands across Twitter began reporting that the company’s pages suddenly went blank. For a site that averages some $51,400 in sales and revenue every minute, the downtime could have cost Amazon a stunning $9.2 million dollars.
Amazon is not responding to press’ requests for a better explanation, only calling it a “technical difficulty” that impacted the U.S. version of the site. It’s only the fourth major outage in the 15-year history, with the others happening in 1999, 2006, and 2008.
Are Amazon’s tight lips about the cause of the outage bad for its business? Barron’s Eric Savitz says yes. “It certainly seems odd to me that Amazon has taken what appear to be a defensive and closed-mouth stance on an issue so basic to its customers: the ability to simply use the site,” he argues. “Jeff Bezos, your customers deserve better.”
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Amazon HTML5-izes Kindle
This is intriguing: Amazon is saying that it will soon roll out the ability to view Kindle books in an HTML5-capable browser–complete with fancy formatting, color pictures, and rich media.
Its initial use of this capability isn’t that big a whoop–it’ll let book lovers sample a tome in their browser before buying it for consumption on a Kindle e-reader, smartphone, or other device. But there’s presumably no reason why the company couldn’t expand on the idea with a fully cloud-based incarnation of Kindle. What if you could pay a flat monthly fee for streaming access to all the books you could read?
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Kindle for Android: Basic, But Still Welcome
On Sunday night, Amazon began embedding audio and/or video in a handful of Kindle e-books for the iPhone and iPad. On Monday, it released a Kindle e-reader for Android phones–and it can’t play those sounds and movies. As with other first incarnations of Kindle apps, it gets the job done but feels a bit bare bones: For instance, if you tap on your phone’s Search button while you’re reading a book, you get a message saying that search is coming soon.
This is still good news for Android handset owners–especially ones who (like me) have already invested in Kindle e-books. It also cements Kindle’s position as the most widely-deployed of the e-reading apps associated with a major book merchant: You can read Kindle books on Amazon’s devices, PCs, Macs, iPhones (and iPod Touches), iPads, BlackBerries, and now Android phones. ePub, championed by Barnes & Noble, Sony, and others is more theoretically open, but it’s kind of moot so long as everyone wraps their e-books up in copy protection and Amazon’s books work with the widest variety of hardware.
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Kindle Books for iPhone, iPad Get Audio and Video
When Kindle books debuted back in 2007, they contained only words and grainy black-and-white photos. Last year, they got color pictures when they arrived on the iPhone (and later on Windows PCs, Macs, and the iPad). And now a handful of Kindle books pack multimedia features, thanks to new editions that can play back audio and video when you view them on an iPhone, an iPod Touch, or an iPad.
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Borders Sort of Responds to the E-Reader Price Wars. You Out There, Sony?
As of Sunday night, the Kobo e-reader sold by Borders was a $150 gadget that dramatically undercut the $259 pricetag on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Then B&N cut the Nook’s price to $199 and introduced a $149 model, and Amazon responded by knocking the Kindle down to $189. The Kobo is still a cheap e-reader, but not strikingly so–especially considering that it has neither a 3G connection nor Wi-Fi.
So Borders has taken action, but not in the form of a straight price reduction: It’s including a $20 gift card with purchase of the Kobo, reducing the effective cost of the e-reader to $129. I don’t think Kobo matters enough (at least not yet) for Amazon or B&N to feel forced to react to this price cut. But I suspect that before all the product introductions and price reductions are done with, we’ll see three standard price points for e-readers: $200 or thereabouts for 3G models, $150 or thereabouts for slightly less fancy ones, and $99 or thereabouts for basic models that you might still plausibly want to own.
Still to be heard from: Sony, whose $169.99 Reader Pocket Edition and $199.99 Reader Touch Edition are now a tad pricey–and whose already-big-ticket $349.99 Daily Edition is totally out of whack with the e-reader economics that Barnes & Noble and Borders established yesterday,
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Amazon Responds
Well that was quick! For a few hours this morning, Barnes & Noble’s 3G Nook cost $70 less than a Kindle. Now the Kindle is ten bucks less than the Nook. Wonder what the chances are that B&N will match or undercut the Kindle’s new $189 pricetag? (It may not need to, given that it’s also announced a $149 version of the Nook.)
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Kindle Rumor De Jour
Thinner, shaper, more responsive, but still-no-color Kindle in August?
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Is iTunes in Trouble With the Feds?
The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Apple’s tactics in the digital music market on antitrust grounds–a business in which Apple’s iTunes has 69 percent of the market and second-place Amazon.com has only eight percent.
The article doesn’t specify much in the way of alleged Apple misdeeds except for threatening to withdraw marketing support for songs if their publishers signed temporary exclusive deals with Amazon. Last time I checked, I wasn’t an antitrust lawyer–is that illegal?