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.
Source: Wired
