Quote:
Originally Posted by bminata
They could remove the wireless option for the $99. A lot of people don't use it anyway.
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It wouldn't save
enough. As mentioned upthread, a teardown by industry analysis house iSuppli put the eInk screen and controller at $80 of the Kindle's cost. There is no way Amazon or anyone else can make a Kindle to sell at $99 and make any money on the deal if eInk is one of the components. The price of eInk sceens will drop, but not that far or fast.
And why should Amazon bother to try? What they want is to sell you the
books. If you buy a Kindle and read them that way, fine. But if you read them with the Kindle app for PC, iPhone, or Android, also fine, or they wouldn't have released those packages.
Think of the Kindle as priming the pump and helping to create a broader market for the ebooks Amazon wants to sell you and the Kindle makes more sense. Since Amazon uses their own custom form of DRM, unless you are willing and able to break the DRM, you are locked into Amazon as the supplier, which is the real point of their exercise.
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Dennis