Amazon spit out a new Kindle announcement today. Are they being a little too voluminous with this stuff? Bigger. Ok. Deluxe - well, the price is pretty deluxe, for Amazon profit. And everyone knows the letter "X" is marketing magic.
If there's a reason for boomers to care about this product release (sometime during the summer) maybe it's the almost 3X more display real estate. But come on, the price tag! In a time of econ crunch, belt tightening and rampant job losses? It's very close to $500. $489.
Other Kindle features:
- It'll handle PDF (portable document format) Adobe's ubiquitous contribution to electronic media.
- The screen rotates when you turn Kindle sideways. Old news. Everyone else did it first.
- Several major text book publishers will alledgedly put their books into Kindle-useable format. And some universites will test the device to see what students think.
Let's see. Text books cost an arm and a leg; a laptop is many hundred dollars; and a Kindle - yeah chuck another half a grand on the fire before your grandchild starts school next fall.
Personally, I have always objected to the business theory of grab a ton of money from each of a few customers and laugh all the way to the bank. I enjoy providing a great product at a fair price to a lot of customers so everyone gains something. With all the people who have supported Jeff Bezos, the Amazon entrepreneur, for a dozen years - since the days of his garage based business model - I'm unpleasantly surprised at his persistance in trying to break the bank and the buyers with Kindle.
Bezos said some newspapers will discount subscriptions if you don't live where you can subscribe to a newsprint version. I bet in five years everyone, all the newspaper moguls, will offer discounted e-subscriptions. But I'm betting it won't be on Kindle.
Hearst and Apple have long threatened to jump on this market segment. I hope someone slows down and does it right. Doesn’t really matter how fast Amazon brings out new Kindles. What we want is an affordable, attractive, easily portable, comfortable electronic reader that supports multiple formats. Then my generation, the Show Me Before I Buy generation, will jump - in droves. I'm waiting.
Note: Dallas Morning News CEO James Moroney told a Senate hearing, according to the Washington Post, "...the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News, and we've negotiated this up to the last two weeks, they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said 'we (Amazon) get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device'. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?
Print | posted @ Wednesday, May 06, 2009 1:01 PM