Amazon continues to develop the Kindle concept, coming out with newer, cheaper, lighter, versions slowly heading for the magic $99 price that will see them fly off the shelf. So far they have reached $139. At $99 they will fall into the gifting category that has served the digital photoframe market so well.
This week saw the introduction of two 6 inch Kindles with one a $189 3G version and the other a $139 WiFi only model. They are both the same size, 21% smaller and 15% lighter, at a mere 8.7 ounces, harldy heavier than some mobile handsets. Viewing contrast is up 50% and the page turns are 20% faster.
Amazon claims that these new devices have one month of battery life and twice the storage at 4GB, with 3GB of it for the user. The Wi-Fi version is now undercutting the 5 inch Sony Pocket Edition which lists at $149, but can be found for around the same price, just under $140.
Effectively Amazon has completely ignored the iPad and all the hoopla around it and just made its core product more price attractive. Shipments start in the US and the UK on August 17 and orders can be placed now and in over 140 countries from August 27.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos perhaps stretched the point when he claimed, “At $139, if you’re going to read by the pool, some people might spend more than that on a swimsuit and sunglasses.’
Amazon has been selling Kindles in the UK, but is now also launching a special version of its e-book store there, which will have local content, starting off with 400,000 new books and more than a million out of copyright works.
A year ago the Kindle was $359. Amazon reduced the price to $189 several weeks back in anticipation of launching the new models. The reduction to $189 prompted a surge in sales, to the point that the company sold out before it could start shipping the new models. The company has said that the $189 price was a tipping point and caused Kindle sales to triple. Amazon sold 3 million Kindles during 2009, so that suggests a new rate of around 750,000 devices a month and that’s before it brought out these even cheaper devices.
While Amazon still won’t let you share your books with others, you can use its Whispersync technology to keep reading your books on a variety of devices if need be. You can go from one to the other while its keeps track of where you are. So you can read books on your Kindle, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices, although reading a book on a PC or a phone is pretty tough on old eyes.
The new Kindles let you Twitter passages to your fans as you read, when you are connected, and it has an improved PDF viewer, and still has dictionary lookup, note-taking and highlighting as well as voice navigation and a read out loud function.