December 27, 2010, 1:30 pm Third-Generation Kindle Is Top-Seller By NICK BILTON Reuters
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/3rd-generation-kindle-is-top-selling-amazon-product/?pagemode=print O.K., here goes: when it comes to the Amazon Kindle, I’ll admit it, I was wrong. When the Apple iPad was announced in January, I wrote a blog post that predicted “Three Reasons Why the iPad Will Kill Amazon’s Kindle.” I noted that Amazon isn’t innovating fast enough and that as a single-purpose reading device, the Kindle was just too expensive. I believed the Kindle would end up in the gadget graveyard because it couldn’t stand a chance against Apple’s proven design and marketing prowess. Amazon clearly wasn’t going into that battle. Instead of going after Apple by building a product that competed with the iPad, Amazon went in the other direction, creating a reading device that is light-weight, relatively simple to use and most importantly, inexpensive. (The third-generation Kindle starts at $140; the Apple iPad begins at $500.) For Amazon, this tactic seem to have paid off. The company said on Monday that the third-generation Kindle is the best-selling product in Amazon’s history, beating out ”Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” which is the seventh book in the Harry Potter series, and until now, the bestselling item ever sold on Amazon. In a company press release, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, even tried to drive the point home that the Kindle is not trying to compete with color reading devices like the iPad. “We’re seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet. Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies and Web browsing, and their Kindles for reading sessions,” Mr. Bezos said in the release, also pointing out the price of the Kindle is “low enough that people don’t have to choose” between devices. Amazon is also wooing customers into the Kindle fold with the approach it has taken to selling e-books, irrelevant of the actual Kindle hardware. The Kindle e-book software is available for nearly all mobile devices, making it simple for customers to read books on an Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, Google Android phone as well as a desktop computer. A person can start reading on one device, stop, and pick it where he left off on another device. By being ecumenical, many e-book customers have quickly become accustomed with the Kindle bookstore no matter what reading device they own. In comparison, the Apple iBookstore is only available on some Apple products. For Amazon to keep its footing in the e-reader space, it is going to need to continue to push the boundaries of price, portability and innovation as a number of new Google Android tablets are expected to enter the marketplace in the coming year. -- ======================================== George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
