Quote:
Originally Posted by Bremen Cole
And don't forget that for the past 3 months Amazon has been pushing the Kindle app on the iPad. I know that I have bought more from Amazon since I have had my iPad then ever before. From the time of the Kindle launch, the Kindle was always featured on the front of the Amazon site. The first two months of the iPad launch, the Kindle was taken down, and instead was a push for their Kindle app for the iPad. They are marketing smart! With 3 million iPads in consumers hands the past 3 months, there was bound to be a surge. If iPad meets projections of 10 million by end of the year, Amazon should be in retail heaven  |
Exactly. For Amazon, it's about selling you the ebooks.
There's a thread elsewhere on MR started by a poster who wants a $99 Kindle. That's nice for him, but what's in it for Amazon? It simply isn't
possible for Amazon to make a Kindle at that price in current form. Dedicated reader devices like the Kindle, Sony Reader, and B&N Nook all use an eInk screen, and the eInk screen and controller account for about $80 of Amazon's manufacturing cost for each unit. Those prices will gradually come down, but not any time soon. There's
no reason for Amazon to take a loss on a Kindle, or even reduce their margins to sell more devices. The Kindle served to prime the ebook pump, but the ebooks are the point.
eBooks are a natural for Amazon. They're the worlds largest catalog retailer, and the world's largest book retailer. They already had the infrastructure to display the catalog and take orders. It was relatively trivial to add the capacity to
fulfill orders by letting you download the title after you had paid for it, and ebooks don't have warehousing and distribution costs.
Amazon has the reader app for the iPhone, the PC, and devices running Google's Android OS (like Motorola's popular Droid phone.) You can assume Amazon will make the Kindle app available for any connected device with a large enough number of sales that can do an effective job of actually displaying the books. Offhand, I'd bet a version of the app for Symbian (used by half the smartphones in the world) is a likely next addition. Amazon uses the Mobipocket format for ebooks, and Mobi has viewers available for PCs, Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. Turning one into a Kindle app is probably a matter of changing the DRM scheme used.)
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Dennis