I think that this is an interesting and complicated question.
On the one hand, at least for me, a touch screen without an additional layer (but with actual buttons to turn pages) (like on the new Sonys, for example), is clearly the most intuitive interface.
On the other hand, 95% of the time I'm using my reader, I'm just reading and turning pages, so the touch interface would just sit there unused: an e-reader isn't a computer and so I'm not constantly inputting data or switching tasks. If this added $100 to the cost of the Kindle - or even $50 - I'm not sure that this would be really worthwhile. (It's hard for me to imagine something like Sony's new touch screen implementation costing less than $50 right now).
I think it's fair to say that Amazon would like for Kindles to be even cheaper; I would imagine that $99 might be an eventual target price. And it seems like the Kindle has been very successful at the $139 price point. So it doesn't seem like Amazon would want to add anything that would increase the cost of the Kindle.
Of course, they could add a new top end Kindle for, say $239 or $289, and call it the Kindle 3G Touch or something similar. I suppose the biggest issue in doing this would be that you would now have different operating systems for the touch vs. the nontouch Kindles - and maintaining two different infrastructures might end up adding additional costs.
So I'll be curious about how this plays out.
|