Quote:
Originally Posted by nnpptt
1) The Kindle has EV-DO internet.
2) The Kindle has 4x the titles to choose from.
You just can't argue with those two facts. That's why the Sony Reader was a dud and the Kindle will pave the way for success in this market.
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Well, you *can* argue those two facts, or at least their relevance or how "big" they are.
EV-DO is in many ways less useful than, for example, wi-fi. About 60% of the land area in the USA doesn't have sprint EVDO, and as far as I know, no where outside the USA. But many places have wi-fi hotspots that truly are free (i.e. no charges for rss, blogs, or emails from yourself of your own content.)
The 4x the titles to choose from is quite misleading. A large number of those titles are not consumer titles, and it also includes a lot of public domain and vanity press titles that are either free elsewhere or not worth reading in the first place. Looking at consumer oriented titles from legit publishers, the advantage for amazon is pretty marginal.
All that said, the kindle is an interesting offering and I am curious whether it kills off sony and is successful enough for amazon to care.
The question is, how many units must amazon sell for them to consider this a success? I would venture it would have to be 5 times what sony sold, i.e. hundreds of thousands of units in the first year or so.
I come to that conclusion by noting that they devoted their entire front page for 3 days to this product during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year, and as of this writing it still consumes 1/3 of the front page. That kind of push is worth many millions in revenue from an eye-balls point of view, they could have been pushing other items that are hot and would have sold many thousands of units.
Hence, anything less than a hundred thousand units in year one has to be considered a disaster for Amazon.