Kindle Fire and the Nook of Doom

Yesterday, Jeff Bezos and company announced--to much fanfare--their latest line of Kindle products, which included the highly-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet.  But the real stars of the show were the prices.  Here's a breakdown:

Kindle Fire $199.99

Kindle (With Special Offers) $79

Kindle Touch (With Special Offers) $99

Kindle Touch 3G $149

 According to Bezos, he's rather comfortable with slim profit margins and is banking on the sales of apps, music, movies, and books to offset those loses.  A smart move, for sure.  Amazon must've been taking detailed notes as they watched other tablet makers fail miserably.  (I also, for some reason, can picture Bezos barking out laughter and rubbing his fingers together manically.)

Will these "non-premium prices" make that much of a difference?  Probably.  At $199, the Fire is a borderline impulse buy, and it will certainly spur a lot of interest from non-techies and families looking to buy their children tablets without having to drop Apple Bucks for an iPad.  But I don't think the Fire will compete much against the iPad, though.  The iPad is still a superior device, and people have come to rely on and fully embrace Apple's technology.  Amazon has a rather spotty track record with hardware--1st gen Kindle, anyone?  I do, however, believe the Fire will put a big dent in iPod sales, which has traditionally been Apple's gateway drug.  If you're gonna drop $229 for an iPod, why not spend a little less for a Fire?

Of course, Amazon's main beef is not with Apple but with Barnes & Noble.  Why go for the fast gazelle when you've got a perfectly good wounded elk close by?  Fortunately for B&N--and I say this with loads of sarcasm--Amazon has been kicking B&N's ass for many years now.  It's nothing new for B&N to play the wounded-animal role to the Amazonian Huntress.

Still, I think there's a lot of overreacting going on here, especially for devices that haven't even shipped yet.  Everything looks great in a presentation, but how will the devices perform in the real world?  Not to mention, once the nostalgia of The New dies down--and with technology that number's measured in nanoseconds--the Fire is just another tablet in an already crowded space.  For that matter, the Kindle Touch is just another keeping-up-with-the-Joneses device, too, since it's essentially no different than what B&N, Sony and Kobo already offer.  Sure, it's less expensive, but that brings me to my final point: vendor lock-in.

If you're not familiar with the term, here's a bit on  it from Wikipedia.  Bottom line, if you've already purchased all these apps, movies, books, etc. that are tied to a specific device, it might not matter how low Amazon prices their Kindles. In part, vendor lock-in is why the Apple iPad dominates the tablet market.  Not because it's the best device out there or the least expensive, but because people have already invested heavily in apps, movies, and music for their iPhones and iPod Touches.  You buy a dozen or so movies, a handful of iBooks, and some of them fancy shoot-'em-up games for your iPhone, you pretty much just justified the price difference between a Fire and an iPad.

There does seem to be  growing movement for demand in vendor neutral services like Netflix and Pandora and so forth, and I imagine that trend isn't going to change, but for now, most people are tethered to their existing devices, and introducing more devices with their own propriety content just doesn't seem to be a game changer.

Either way, it's gonna be interesting  to watch all this play out.

Read More

A Nook, a Kindle and a Tablet Walk into a Bar ...

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, animals both domesticated and wild, pokol; vurderlak; eyalik.



Image courtesy of wired.com


Some interesting debates over e-books since the news broke of Barnes & Noble's new nook e-reader. I think the pros and cons between the Kindle and nook have been exhausted, so I'll try to avoid who has the bigger--um--set of features. My take is quite simple: demand for e-readers will taper off if they continue to use proprietary formats.

Here's how I see the e-reader market as it stands between the two current top-tier devices, Amazon's Kindle and B&N's nook. Amazon has positioned their device for people more inclined to want technology over longevity by using a proprietary format, no problem for magazine or newspaper subscribers, but horrible for avid book readers that might actually use a good chunk of memory to house their libraries--the same avid readers that Barnes & Nobles is hoping to snag with the nook, which uses open standards (Epub, pdf, eReader) and offers a cute little lending option that allows nook users to share books with other nook users for 14 days.

Enter Apple. They're just sitting in the background and sharpening their talons. It's rumored that Apple doesn't want to participate in the e-book world, obviously because they are above all that nonsense, but for the helluvit, let's just assume Apple is lying; let us assume they plan to make a go at the e-book market once they introduce their tablet early next year. Who would be their target readers? Answer: Tech-savvy casual readers, who want eye-popping color for magazine subscriptions and newspapers. Compare that to the current 16-shades-of-gray E Ink technology in the Kindle and we're talking the difference between black & white television and Blu-ray. In this sense B&N will be free to nab up hardcore readers that are looking for a device to a) offset limited shelf space b) reduce the number of books carried while traveling c) are technical savvy people who are also avid readers.

Some of you may be reading this and saying, I own a Kindle and I read a lot, so you're a dumb ass. I am a dumb ass, but that's besides the point. I'm not saying the Kindle is not used by avid readers, I'm saying that Amazon has done a poor job of positioning the device for avid readers. You have a company promoting a device that can store thousands of books ... but only if you purchase every single one of those books from them.

So is the nook the Kindle killer? Nope. But if Amazon isn't careful, they're gonna pit themselves up against Apple, and that, I fear, would be a slaughter.

Read More

Attack of the Kindle

Wanted to pass this article along from Publisher Weekly:

Sourcebooks to Delay Release of eBook Version of Hot New YA Novel

Big publishers throughout the industry have been quietly discussing postponing the release of ebook versions of their frontlist hardcover fiction after the dramatic spike in Kindle sales at the widely-despised (within the industry) $9.95 price point--but independent Sourcebooks is the first to score headlines for delaying an ebook release. The WSJ covers their decision to delay an ebook release of Kaleb Nation's BRAN HAMBRIC: The Farfield Curse for at least six months. Sourcebooks has announced a 75,000-copy first printing for September and agent Richard Curtis concurs with the decision: "We don't want to undercut the sales and royalty potential of the printed hardcover." Sourcebooks ceo Dominique Raccah says "hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it," adding "it doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99." Of course there's another big September release coming where author and publisher have yet to disclose whether they will allow a simultaneous ebook release. Agent Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media Group says "he doesn't allow any of his authors' books to be published simultaneously as an e-book when he can prevent it." He tells the Journal, "It's no different then releasing a DVD on the same day that a new movie is released in the movie theaters. Why would you do that?"

The real problem, as I see it, is how does this affect book burning? You can't throw a whole Kindle into the fire, and deleting the book just doesn't offer the same satisfaction as the smells of burning paper and glue.

Read More