Amazon's much hyped Kindle 2 e-book reader is now in stock and on sale at amazon.com. But at $360 a pop, will book lovers be willing to shell out for the new device? Maybe. According to some analysts, sales of the reader could top $1.2B by 2010. Amazon management remains very optimistic about the growth opportunities. http://www.cnbc.com/id/29352066 But given the tanking stock market and massive loss of consumer confidence over the last year, I would venture to say that the growth picture is not as rosy as management would have us believe. Though the Kindle 2 is ergonomically designed, lightweight and can hold up to 1,500 books, the heafty pricetag, in my opinion, will be hard for average readers to swallow.
On top of this is the whole "network effect" question. Many, like Tim'Oreilly would argue that unless Kindle is "open source", the brand will quickly die. http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthroughs_oreilly.html I tend to agree with this argument - much like Microsoft won out in the Operating System wars of the 1980's, Amazon should focus on making Kindle the indutry standard in the e-reader space by allowing other e-book formats.
Already we are seeing growing competition on the horizon in this space. Google is nipping at Amazon's heels - the Google Book Search project just made 1.5M titles available to i-Phone users for free. http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/02/06/2009-02-06_google_book_search_project_now_on_mobile.html and I would suspect they will not stop there. In my opinion, Amazon needs to focus thier efforts on tapping a wider audience early so that they can lock up future growth - to me this means they should lower their price and open its device up to all e-book formats.
No comments:
Post a Comment