It’s not a revolutionary concept. You want some visibility so you offer what would normally be a paid service or product for free. As word of mouth grows, you bump the price back to normal levels, occasionally higher, and profit. Easy enough.
That’s what many book publishers are starting to do with titles on the Kindle, the New York Times reported this weekend. The article focuses on Maureen Johnson, an author whose young adult fiction has climbed as high as number three on the Kindle best-selling charts. It’s being run for free on the device to drive interest in her upcoming sequel, which will release this February.
While some publishers – Random House and Scholastic for two – embrace the free model, others, like Hachette, find it “illogical.” They believe the price of ebooks is already too low, so why go any lower? In fact, a lot of publishers delay ebook publication for a few months after a book’s release to capitalize on hardcover sales.
Obviously, as time goes on, we’re going to see publishers get more and more creative to keep profits up in the face of lower prices for retail media.
Amazon announced today that the Kindle would be opening up for development of third-party apps. It’s getting everything too, not just weather widgets and email browsers. You want games? You got ‘em. Though, you’ll probably hate most of them on that e-ink display.
Really, this has to be a future-proofing move for Amazon. I can’t imagine many developers will be clamoring to get apps on the device, especially with the limitations in place. Free apps have to be less than 1MB and use less than 100KB of data per month. Paid apps are under the same usage limit but can be as large as 100MB, though anything over 10MB has to be downloaded via USB.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of apps that could be successful on a Kindle. The screen refresh works for ebooks, but imagine trying to play a game. It’s just not going to work out. The real benefit, it seems, will be to get developers involved before the release of some sort of color Kindle with a real screen. Until then, I’m pretty sure the “apps” will just be ebooks that serve specific markets.
Amazon today quietly confirmed that it would start selling the Kindle DX in international markets in the near future. The news isn’t really a shock after the GSM Kindle announcement. As you may recall, the DX is the bigger version designed for textbooks and newspapers. It’s the model that was offered to Princeton students free of charge. The model those same students hated.
According to SlashGear, Amazon has only said “next year” with regard to a date and won’t say anything about pricing. The international Kindle 2 runs $20 above the states-only version. I’d guess the DX will be about the same, giving Princeton the unique opportunity of subsidizing $20 toward even crappier AT&T service for the rest of us. Thanks guys!
Amazon is cutting the price of the Kindle once more, this time hoping for a holiday rush. When the Kindle 2 launched it was $359. It dropped to $299 in July and has now cut another $40, bringing the world’s most famous e-reader to an almost reasonable $259 ($199 and we’ll talk, Bezos).
With the price cut also came news that wireless download capabilities have been added internationally in 10 different countries. That’s a big update for a feature that was previously only available stateside. The updated wireless also comes with a carrier change, from Sprint to (gasp!) AT&T. Yes, AT&T will be handling wireless communications for the internationally capable device in the US and abroad, which makes me wonder, does AT&T want to bury itself under a mountain of complaints? Of course, there are so few Kindles in the wild compared the newly VoIP over 3G enabled iPhones that this is probably a molecule in the vast ocean of AT&T’s wireless demands.
Of course by “ate” I mean “deleted without warning” and by “Amazon” I mean “another in the growing list of evil companies who can’t get their digital rights straight.” The suit, which is a class action, is being brought by Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old from Michigan who lost his notes on George Orwell’s 1984 when Amazon went and pulled the book from all of its Kindle devices.
While I am glad to see someone taking legal action on the matter, it’s a little absurd that it was a 17-year-old who had to do the deed. I would hardly call losing your summer reading notes a serious injunction, but then, what really could be in this situation? The most serious part is simply that Amazon did it, and they shouldn’t have. Now it’s up to the courts to decide if that has any reasonable legal implications. My guess is they’ll simply say, “no.”
In case you missed it yesterday, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle to $299. Rumor has it the price drop comes as a result of increased competition from other manufacturers eager to enter the market.
Ross Rubin, a consumer analyst at NPD group had some disparaging remarks. “While it is a significant drop both in terms of the overall percentage of the price as well as getting under the $300 barrier, it is still not going to be enough to break it out of its niche,” he said. For the most part I agree. Getting under $300 probably means a few more people will pick up the device, but the price of the media hasn’t changed, and neither have the DRM issues, so it’s tough to see the Kindle really “take off” as a result of the cut.
Amazon will be offering consumers a $60 credit if they purchased a Kindle in the last 30 days. The Kindle DX, which sports a larger screen, remains at the $489 price point. For now, anyway.
A couple days back I made a post about what it would take for me to get a Kindle. I’m looking for cheaper access to ebooks on more devices, and according to Jeff Bezos, I should be getting one of those wishes in the near future.
At a conference this week, Bezos laid out his plan for Amazon’s Kindle brand in full detail.
The device team has the job of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world. We are going to give the device team competition. We will make Kindle books, at the same $9.99 price points, available on the iPhone, and other mobile devices and other computing devices.
The good news, obviously, is that we’ll start to see ebooks on more portable and more versatile devices. The Kindle App for the iPhone is a great example of this, bringing the books to a device you’ll have with you regardless, not requiring you to lug something like a Kindle around.
As for bad news I can’t help but wonder, what’s the lifespan of the Kindle? Bringing ebooks to devices that have more features than the Kindle means one thing – the Kindle is going to die. Purpose-built devices have been disappearing for decades as consumers look for that all-in-wonder device. Cellphones, portable gaming systems, digital cameras, and digital camcorders have now all been wrapped up into one device. We went from word processors to computers to laptops to laptops with built in fingerprint readers and webcams and anything else you can imagine. Purpose-built devices are a dying breed, at least for the consumer-level use, and particularly in the case of the Kindle.
Unfortunately, Bezos’ $9.99 price point is still too rich for my blood. I rarely buy books at that price, and for the new releases I’ll splurge on, I want more than a restrictive file format to show for it. As Amazon’s eBooks get more popular and become available on more devices I know prices will go down, but I doubt Amazon will loosen restrictions.
With the release of the Kindle DX, plenty of folks have been asking the same question: will you get one? For me, the answer is no. I like the feel of a physical book in my hands too much to let a Kindle take its place. I also love used book shopping, where I can pick up classic (and sometimes new) titles for less than a buck.
It was this post over at Crave that really made me wonder, what would it take to get me interested in a Kindle? For me that question has a simple translation. When is it more convenient to have a Kindle than a book? The Kindle doesn’t have enough features outside book reading to make it compelling for reasons other than book reading, so I’m going to ignore them. For me, it comes down to convenience and the emotional experience I get from reading a book.
I like the reasons Stein gives for his own experience. Pulling a book out on the subway is much more cumbersome than flipping to the Kindle app on his iPhone. The appeal is the same in my life, but paying full book price for something I can only read on a Kindle or an iPhone seems ridiculous.
What I could really use is both – something like movie studios have been doing recently to attempt to combat downloads – adding a digital copy to the physical media. As it currently stands, downloading books from the Kindle store is incredibly restrictive, and if you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books as well. Offering an option to download the book when I purchase the physical media could change that, giving me control of the storage (and yes, distribution) of my media.
Obviously there are pirating concerns for Amazon, and they lose the sweet deal they have going now whereby they reap most of the profit from selling digital copies. It’s hard to imagine, though, that they wouldn’t see increased usage from this sort of change. The iPhone Kindle App becomes a lot more appealing when it means I can continue my reading without lugging a book around but still have the option to kick back and fill margins with notes when I get the urge.
For now, a Kindle is the wrong device for me. I can’t help but think I’m paying a fee to relinquish control of my purchase, and that just doesn’t feel right.
As soon as the Kindle hit the market, people started talking about a full color version, but according to Jeff Bezos, they’ll have to wait. Years. He can’t say how many.
I’m not entirely surprised. The e-ink screen technology doesn’t directly adapt to a color format, which means developing a new display medium for the device. We all know how long that can take. Most concepts for such a display are just that: concepts. Perhaps the best one from Philips is still FAR from production, particularly in something like a Kindle.
Bezos has also reconfirmed that Amazon will not release any specific sort of sales numbers for the Kindle. It’s obviously not because they don’t care. I guess they just don’t want us to know.
With Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle DX, sites like Wired have been polling students to see just how successful the device might be. Turns out, not too many people are turned on.
For starters, the device comes in at a hefty $500, a price that makes schlepping twenty pounds of books to class seem reasonable. And once you’ve paid for the device, how much is each title going to cost? And what of reselling options? College students are crafty, thrifty buggers who would sooner share a textbook between five people than part with precious beer money.
If cost of ownership wasn’t a glaring enough problem, there’s still the functionality of the device. As one student said, everyone has a laptop now. Why carry two devices? And what if someone needs to borrow your textbook. Do you loan them your $500 DX? And isn’t old tech like a highlighter or a pen working faster for note taking than the DX’s sluggish input system? And, and, and, and, and?
All of these questions are simply answered by tech strategist Michael Gartenberg.
You can’t introduce technology like this, which has got a lot of breakthrough things associated with it, and expect it to be business as usual. The reason the iPod worked was not only did it introduce new technology, but it introduced a new business model for the technology as well.
For now, everyone is still comparing the Kindle to the old medium, books. It now falls to Amazon to make the $9.8 billion textbook industry rethink their methods of distribution and publication to make this device truly viable. If Amazon can keep themselves from getting too greedy, they just might pull this thing off.
In order for a touchscreen to be successful, the user needs to feel that he is in constant control, and for this, responsiveness is key—even small lags can prove immensely frustrating. One recent offender of this rule is the Blackberry Storm, RIM’s first touchscreen phone.
Some history: Before the Storm was released, there was a lot of buzz surrounding its supposedly ground-breaking touchscreen, which depresses like a button, giving users a satisfying “click”.
But when users and reviewers actually got their hands on their device, the real shock was how buggy the whole thing was. The touchscreen suffered from long delays—often a second or more—that made users yearn for their old button-based Blackberry. And completing simple tasks took an unnecessary number of steps. For example, inputting the letter “C” involves putting one’s finger on the letter, waiting for the phone to respond by highlighting the letter, and then pushing down. All that for a simple letter.
I can definitely agree with some of this. BlackBerry, for instance, had a good vision when designing the touch-and-click function in the Storm, but the execution was less than stellar. Have you tried this thing? Press and hold, press harder, wait for it… wait for it… and click. Are you kidding me? That’s the ultra-innovative touch-screen we’ve been waiting for? Please.
I can’t agree too much with the Wii Remote. After all, they did include a wrist strap with every Wiimote. If you choose not to use the wrist strap, that’s at your own risk.
I’ve already touched on the Kindle vs. the Kindle 2 here, so I won’t go there right now.
Check out the article and let me know if you know of any sweet gadgets that have a clear miss in the design.
It’s not a revolutionary concept. You want some visibility so you offer what would normally be a paid service or product for free. As word of mouth grows, you bump the price back to normal levels, occasionally higher, and profit. Easy enough. 
As soon as the Kindle hit the market, people started talking about a full color version, but according to Jeff Bezos, they’ll have to wait. Years. He can’t say how many. 
