Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
When Amazon sell the Kindle at cost, relying on content sales for their profit, it's extremely difficult for anyone to compete on cost terms because:
1. They need to make a profit on selling the device itself.
2. They almost certainly won't be able to match Amazon's bulk discounts on the cost of manufacturing the device, because Amazon are manufacturing in enormously greater volumes.
The successful manufacturers who are not associated with a bookstore have to compete by offering premium products and sell on features, rather than price.
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That was pretty much what I was getting at, yes - that the fact that the not-well-known manufacturers currently price their products above, say, Amazon's level pretty much indicates that this is a
necessity.
If they had any option to compete on price (and still stay in business), I'd rather assume they'd do so, because they can't really compete in added value (such as an associated bookstore) or brand recognition.
The best they can do is offer a decent-quality device (and other than Sony's readers, I don't think any of the others, although their products are probably perfectly fine, can claim to offer
better quality than Amazon or Kobo) that has more features - touchscreen
and buttons, Wi-Fi, reading almost every format known to man, audio/MP3 support, etc.
Which of course doesn't help in bringing the price down - but leaving those options off certainly wouldn't reduce the price nearly enough to make them competitive on just price.