Amazon firing up Kindle sales on Monday?
Word on the street web out of CNET is that Monday is the day that Amazon unleashes their Kindle eBook reader. Expected at $399, the electronic device has to compete with Sony’s newest reader version as well as the latest Cybook from Bookeen, both of which are priced lower. Sony’s PRS-505 costs $299 while the Cybook is available for around $350. Why the price premium and is it worth it? We can’t answer the second question, but Amazon is expected to have the largest available eBook content, which shouldn’t command extra dollars, but probably will. Additionally, the device might have fast EV-DO capabilities for book downloading via Sprint’s network. Digital book content typically isn’t that large, so I still wonder if that type of connection is overkill for a book reader (unless it has web-browsing capabilities), but we’ll have to examine the details upon launch to better assess.
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Sigh. The price points are just too high for mass-market. Will someone please debut one of these for $100 and just eat the loss (make it up in book sales or something)???
I know, we could sell a contract plan to download books wirelessly, and sell the reader at a low 99 dollar price tag! Then, if someone tries to cancel their contract early, we just hit them for 250 dollars! That’ll stop churn and offset the cost of the subsidized reader hardware price!
Oh wait.
;)
I think the idea of ebooks is interesting. It almost seems like a red herring.
Start with an established medium (print on paper) that has been a strong force in media distribution since the inception of the printing press.
introduce the internet, which is like the physical network of book/cd/movie distribution, times a billionty.
We still have books, but.. but.. paper’s so *old* compared to this new computer interweb thing. No one wants paper anymore. I know, let’s make a book, but make it electronic! Then it’s still a physical thing, but instead of paper, you *display* the words! And you have to plug it in to charge, and you can only download some books onto it, because this new internet thing lets you take any book and distribute it for free, so we can’t really do that, I mean you can’t do that with *real* books….
There are significant advantages with ebooks. For one, college students wouldn’t have to lug around 50 lbs. of textbooks. Another thing is text size. Most readers support resizing text as you are reading and this is very helpful to people who have poor eyesight. Cheaper distribution should equal cheaper prices, although I don’t feel this has really happened at any of the ebook stores.
Maarket for ebook readers seems to be taking off soon.
I saw a dejavu with the digital music industry.
1997 then is 2007 now.
MP3 in 1997 then is PDF in 2007 now.
In 1997, there was no good DAPs yet (until iPods arrived in 2001).
The Kindle is going to be another forgettable device (until Apple new Newton based on iPhones optimized for book reading arrives in 2010).
Note that the availability of the online ebook store is completely irrelevant.
Considering that 97% of what fill iPods are user-generated MP3s, without MP3s, the DAP market won’t take off.
Same thing with ebook readers, 97% of the content that fill Newton is not going to come from the online ebook store, but user-generated PDFs. and now with the availability of our product BookSnap (http://booksnap.atiz.com) that makes book ripping more practical, we expect to see more excitement in the ebook readers.