Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
Just remember, nothing is free.
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Well, it is true that someone has to pay. But it doesn't have to be me. I don't pay for the software and server mobileread.com is on.
Public library? Well, I pay through taxes for the ones in my township. But I also get to use those in other Pennsylvania towns for free. (It used to be that state taxes subsidized inter-library cooperation, but this is almost eliminated.)
Free after rebate used to be a lot more common in the US than it is now, but it still happens.
My guess is that they will give you a black and white Kindle at a price, but included may be a content gift certificate equal to the cost of the Kindle. If all you read on the Kindle is public domain books, your "nothing is free" principal will apply. But if you normally pay for a fair amount of your reading material, a Kindle will be, for practical purposes, free.
Now, it the Kindle started coming with a gift card equal to the purchase price, and the gift card could be used for any Amazon purchase, I would regard that as a strictly free Kindle, since Amazon sells a wide variety of merchandise at WalMart-competitive prices. However, I'm sure we won't see that kind of strictly free Kindle this year, except maybe if you pay for Amazon Prime.
When the march to free really will happen is hard to say without knowing how quickly the device price Amazon pays to FoxConn is going down.
You might ask: The march to free never happened with Palm PDA's, so why should Kindle be different? I think the difference is that Amazon is primarily a seller of content rather than of hardware. They need tens of millions of Kindles out there to sell more content.