The New Amazon Kindle is Here
Posted on February 11, 2009 at 02:33 AM
I just saw Amazon’s new Kindle 2 reader and it looks much better. The previous design simply lacked elegance and the new model seems to have closed that gap rather smartly.
Fiscally, I just can’t justify the price tag. I don’t know what Amazon’s cost is, but at $359.00 they can’t be subsidizing much, if at all. I think they need to take a page from the iPhone playbook and find some way to soften the up front purchase price. The actual book prices seem to be steeply discounted, but I think I would be more inclined to jump on board if the initial purchase price was much lower, even if there was a slightly higher book price over time. This seems to be working out pretty well for the video game and mobile phone industry.
I’ve been reading quite a bit on my iPhone lately and, ironically, that is a pretty clunky purchase process compared to iPhone application purchasing and the Kindle (from what I can tell). But, for text based works, it is hard to beat the convenience, although the pricing seems pretty steep compared to the Kindle. Maybe I’m just shopping in the wrong place? If anyone knows where I can get cheap e-books, let me know.