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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 new larger Kindle DX is now on sale for $489.
The Kindle DX started shipping on June 10th, 2009 and, within two days stocks were exhausted. The original Kindle sold out in less than 6 hours in November 2007, so the DX lasted a bit longer – even so, it’s a strong indication that customers are ready and willing to pay the asking price.
New stocks of the DX are due by June 17th and, almost inevitably, some industry watchers are suggesting that the “sell out” was stage managed by Amazon to attract even further publicity to the launch. It’s not out of the question perhaps, but given how quickly the DX release followed the launch of the Kindle 2 (February 2009) it may not be the most likely explanation.
The announcement of a tie up between Google and Sony which saw Google’s vast library of public domain ebooks made available to users of the Sony PRS reader would seem just as likely to have been an influencing factor in Amazon’s apparent haste to bring the DX to market.
In a similar way, Amazon may well have wished to be ready to cash in on initiatives like California’s plan to provide academic textbooks in digital format to their high school students. Just five days before 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 August of 2009. The Kindle was not mentioned during this announcement, and it should be noted that there are plenty of alternative methods which students may use to read their electronic textbooks but, given that Amazon have always marketed the Kindle as the ideal device for viewing textbooks, the Amazon marketing team must have been over the moon with the announcement.
Amazon already have agreements in place with academic textbook publishers to make their output available in Kindle format. It seems highly probable that other states will follow California’s lead. In which case Amazon are perfectly poised to service this emerging market.
There will continue to be criticism of the Kindle. The price, the lack of color, the text to speech facility etc. will probably be identified as – at best – opportunities for improvement. Amazon will continue to develop the Kindle, making 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 ever increasing numbers from Amazon – will probably go some way to making the criticism easier to bear.