Quote:
Originally Posted by GA Russell
Of course, the retail price would have to be low, just as the simple pocket calculator's price is low.
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And if the price is low, so is the profit.
The point of the original article is that in the low-price arena *nobody* is going to be lower than the ebookstore guys. Not for long. And nobody is going to invest millions in design and marketing to make a living off peanuts; companies aren't in business as a public service, they're in the game to make money for their owners.
*My* point is that would-be competitors need a value-add model where they add compelling features to justify a premium price; that just shipping a barebones reader that simply opens epubs and maybe PDFs isn't going to get you very far against the Nooks and Kindles of the world. Minimalist readers are *not* going to be a sustainable business, not when the ebookstore guys are shipping readers with a pretty decent feature sets at minimal prices.
Take a look at the new features on the K3; Amazon didn't just drop prices, they added functionality.
http://www.teleread.com/2010/08/01/u...-the-kindle-3/
And they're moving to retail, to boot.
There's room to compete but not at the bottom; to survive you need to offer a *more* robust reading experience not a leaner one.