Quote:
Originally Posted by Gideon
Meh....
Also.... what's the deal with people complaining about the price so much. I mean, yeah, I don't like it - but it's in keeping with the tech prices right now. It's not excessive or anything. How much is the big Iliad, again...?
But yeah... you're expecting too much, bud. I might as well go "I want my iPhone to know who I'm gonna call in advance." You can't expect tech that was high tech when it had wireless access at all to jump to all of that in the next iteration.
|
Simple - Amazon played up how this is aimed at students and textbooks... How many students do you know have $500 for an e-book reader... The value proposition for the Kindle is already pretty weak, but the free wireless internet helps that equation a bit. The steeper cost of the DX makes it harder to show the value of the device.
Sure Amazon could work out a deal with textbook publishers for college textbooks but the entire college textbook deal is such a racket that I wouldn't expect students to benefit from it... If anything I think the textbook publishers would embrace this to kill the used textbook market off with colleges endorsing it because they'll get more kickbacks from the publishers PLUS Amazon will work out deals with the schools where they get even more kickbacks for pushing their students on to Kindles...
How about newspapers... I can buy a newspaper for $0.25 or $0.40 and subscriber to it for even less, and while I'm reading it other members of my household can enjoy sections of that very same paper - all without disturbing me. The DX may make it easier to read a newspaper on a Kindle but to share it with the family means that everybody else has to wait until I finish reading. Either that or I have to purchase multiple devices AND multiple subscriptions since we can't share subscriptions between multiple devices on the same account - something I can do when I subscribe to the paper version.
That being said offering a DX for around $100 with say a 12 or 18 month subscription to a newspaper - well that might be tempting. If a college offered a $489 DX and included the student's first year of texts on it - I might look a little more favorably on the device, even moreso if additional textbooks were sold to the student at a real discount as opposed to the make believe discounts offered by publishers/schools for "customized" texts...
However, with the size of the DX it really should be targeted at a different kind of Kindle user than I am. I travel a lot - and I love having several books loaded on to my K2 with the ability to order more while I'm on the road. The K2 fits in my carry-on that includes a laptop and frequently a DSLR camera and assorted bits. However I couldn't get a device the size of the DX into my carry on.