Another Amazon Kindle!
A larger screen, more expensive Kindle for textbooks and newspapers. $489. WOW! Is it just me, or is there a huge disconnect between Amazon’s pricing and what consumers have to spend these days?
I don’t know a lot of students that have $489 to spend on yet another device. All a student needs is a cell phone and a laptop. Taking notes in class, writing essays, working on models, doing simulations, presentations, coding, etc… You need a laptop. With a laptop you can already access e-textbooks on a number of sites.
How about Newspapers? Would I spend $489 on a specialized, larger screen device for my breakfast table? No way. There’s not enough “there” there. My breakfast table already has a beautiful MacBook on it. The whole family uses it. It’s color. It plays videos and songs. It has email. It has maps. Every blog there is. Almost every newspaper in the world, for FREE.
There are so many better things I can do with $489. Here’s a few: buy a couple of iPhones, by a book every month for the next 3 years, sponsor a family in Africa for 2.5 years, take at trip to the Caribbean….
In the meantime, the good news is that there is continued focus on the e-Reading market, and with that comes investment and innovation. Just like soap operas changed with the advent of TV, so too will books and other reading material with new mobile internet devices. It’s just early, and eReaders like the Kindle are just too pricey for what you get.
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I have had an eBook reader for years (Sony PRS-500 and PRS-505), and I would buy the Kindle DX in a heartbeat if it was available in Canada. Reading on a computer or my iPhone is nothing compare to ePaper, and frankly I don’t have the space for real books anymore. The only thing I don’t like about my reader is that the screen is too small and not all the books are available in Canada.
Right….except that Amazon is obviously going after the early adopters who have money to spend for the hardware, and offering books at a reduced price which is usually around $4 less. Meanwhile Chapters/Indigo want you to buy into the e-reading revolution by spending at least $4 more for the e-book version?
Seems to me like a response to the late realization of where the book revenue is going…