Amazon has attracted a fair bit of criticism of late regarding the price of their Kindle ebook reader family. The Kindle 2 is priced at $359 and the latest addition, the larger Kindle DX is now on sale for $489.
The Kindle DX commenced shipping on June 10th, 2009 and, within two days stocks were exhausted. Not quite as fast as the launch of the original Kindle back in November of 2007 which sold out in less than 6 hours perhaps – but a very clear indication that customers are perfectly willing to pay the asking price.
New stocks of the DX are scheduled for June 17th and, almost inevitably, some industry watchers are suggesting that the “sell out” was stage managed by Amazon to attract even further publicity for the launch. It’s not out of the question perhaps, but considering how quickly the DX release followed the launch of the Kindle 2 (February 2009) it may not be the most probable explanation.
The announcement of a tie up between Google and Sony which meant that Google’s vast collection of public domain ebooks made available to users of the Sony PRS reader would seem just as likely to have been an important factor in Amazon’s apparent rush to bring the DX to market.
In a similar way, Amazon may well have wished to be ready to cash in on initiatives such as California’s plan to furnish academic textbooks in digital format to their high school students. Just five days in advance of the launch of the DX, Governor Schwarzenegger announced that free digital textbooks would be launched in California – starting with the science and math subject areas – in the Fall of 2009. No mention of the Kindle was made, and there are plenty of other methods which students can use to read their electronic textbooks but, considering that Amazon have always pushed the Kindle as the ideal device for reading textbooks, the Amazon marketing team must have been delighted with the announcement.
Amazon already has understandings in place with academic textbook publishers to make their output available in Kindle format. If, as seems probable, other states follow California’s lead, then Amazon are very well placed to service this emerging market.
Criticism of the Kindle will continue. The price, the inability to display color, the text to speech facility etc. will no doubt be cited as – at best – areas for improvement. Amazon will continue to develop the Kindle, incorporating whatever improvements their customers demand. In the meantime, the sales of the reader, the books from the Kindle store and the Kindle accessories – available in constantly increasing numbers from Amazon – will probably go some way to making the criticism more tolerable.
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