Thread: Bloomberg: new Kindle in August
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Old 05-30-2010, 01:40 PM   #37
Kali Yuga
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory View Post
This is about as exciting as a "New and Improved" box of Kleenex.... But they have to have something more than this? Don't they?
Not really.

Amazon planned from the start, for a variety of reasons, to generate income from both the ebooks and the ebook readers.

In comparison, Apple sells hardware and generates around $9 billion in iPhone-type sales per year, but only $1 billion from all its content -- iTunes music, apps and all Mac software, and so forth. They are perfectly happy for Amazon to grab ebook sales, since that's chump change to them and relieves them of the need to work too hard at providing content.

Also, the dynamics of the ebook market are not as flat as you might think. To simplify, there are two separate customer bases: the casual readers (most of the public, who buy 1-10 books a year) and the heavy readers (10+ books per year). The heavy readers are a small percentage of buyers, but spend far more than the masses who barely read; they're also more likely to spring for a dedicated reader, either instead of or -- especially if cheap enough -- in addition to a tablet.

Further, at this time you can read an ebook you purchase from Amazon on your iPhone, your Kindle, your iPad, your Windows netbook, or your desktop computer, all syncing via Whispernet. An iBook can currently only be read on an iPad and that's it.

Thus, the casual reader probably wasn't going to buy a dedicated reader in the first place; and for the heavy readers, each iPad purchase does not necessarily mean one lost sale for the Kindle, or even fewer Kindle ebook sales.

Ergo, Amazon doesn't need to make another iPad. They're better off making a better dedicated device and improving their software.


That said, what does a dedicated ebook reader need? Better performance, a color screen, lower price, better annotations, perhaps a larger screen. Color is probably a year out (maybe more, who knows), so in the meantime they can fix up what they can, without necessarily losing the die-hard 3-or-more-fiction-books-a-month crowd.
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