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 | E-Readers
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 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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Plastic Logic's QUE: Late to the Point of Irrelevance
Plastic Logic began talking about building e-readers using its plastic-circuit technology as early as 2000. It began demoing a reader in 2008 and did a full reveal of its QUE ProReader at CES 2010 back in January, saying it would ship it in April at the steep starting price of $649. Then it said it would ship on June 24th. Which was yesterday. Now it’s postponing it “a bit longer” to improve it further, and has canceled all orders.
(The company isn’t saying what exactly it’s trying to improve about the gadget; when I tried one back at CES, I liked the look and feel of the user interface, but found it to be alarmingly sluggish.)
In normal times, delaying an interesting product by a few months might not be catastrophic. But just about everything about e-readers has changed since CES: We’re now in the iPad era, and the best-known dedicated e-readers now sell for under $200. The QUE still has some theoretical virtues–a big screen, long battery life thanks to the use of monochrome E-Ink, a focus on business use that includes content licensed from famous brands, and that slick interface–but it’s tough to imagine it thriving whenever it does appear. Certainly at $$649-$799, and maybe at any price.
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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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Nook Pricing Conundrum
As of today, Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader costs $199. Yesterday, on Father’s Day, it was still $259, but with a special offer. My old pal Brad Grimes continues, in a comment from our post today on Amazon’s Kindle price cut:
I bought a $259 Nook yesterday (Sunday) as a gift for my father, enticed by an offer for a “free” $50 gift card. When I saw the price today, I called to see if I could get the difference back. I was told I could get only $10 back. It turns out, after looking at my receipt, they didn’t charge me for a $259 Nook and then give me a “free” $50 gift card, as advertised. They gave me a $209 Nook and charged me $50 for the gift card. Was I just shafted by Barnes & Noble? Harry, help an old friend!!!
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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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Nook Gets Cheaper…and Even Cheaper
Barnes & Noble has knocked the price of its Nook e-reader down from $259 to $199–and announced a Nook with Wi-Fi but no 3G connection for $149. The $199 model is the lowest-cost e-reader with 3G; the $149 one matches the price of the Kobo from B&N retail archrival Borders. (The Kobo doesn’t even have Wi-Fi–you download books to a computer, then sync them over via USB cable.)
Amazon.com’s Kindle is still $259 as I write, but Amazon has had plenty of time to decide how to respond to a B&N-initiated price war, and presumably has a strategy in place already. Seems like the general post-iPad trend is for E-Ink e-readers to get dive down below $200 in price; it’ll be surprising if the Kindle–the current model, anyhow–is an exception.