There's a calculus involved here. Because certainly not everyone will be using their Kindles to purchase books from Amazon, nor would Amazon expect everyone to.
And although completely free is nice, I would expect some kind of lock in, purchase a 50 dollar gift card get a Kindle. 25 would be allright too.
But basically,
Would the purchases of all those new Kindle owners offset the costs involved in giving the Kindle's away for "free"?
I mean, do you think Amazon has the balls to drop a few billion to give everybody and their brother a Kindle? At least everyone with a credit card and an Amazon account?
Let's just say Amazon needs to hand out 50 million Kindles to get this thing going. If they cost say 100 dollars to manufacture, that would be only 5 billion dollars.
Wikipedia says Bezos has 12.6 billion net worth.
How long would it take for Bezos to double his money back, from sales of books through his site? Assuming the standard 30% cut of all book sales.
I don't think we have to assume any difference in the rate of book sales, even though we obviously could for numerous reasons. Just a simple extrapolation of the current number, do you think there's 5 million Kindles in the wild? So multiple the current revenue per month by 10.
lol, just read this I guess, it does sound doable, major risk of course..
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2447...evenue-in-2015