Saturday, November 28, 2009

Amazon Kindle for Free

Why is the Amazon Kindle so expensive?
For that matter why does it come at a cost at all?
It is like the shaving razors. Companies like Gillette and Wilkinson doe not make money from selling the stick that holds that razor blade, rather from the razor blades. Razor blades are a repeat buy and yields much more revenue.
Ok a better analogy. Did you know you could by BlackBerry 9000 bold for $0.01? It comes bundled with the AT&T plan. So how do you At&T recovers the cost of Blackberry it is offering free? Yeah, you got it? Talk time, Texting, Internet access, etc.
Ditto with Kindle. It is the content (books, and magazine and newspaper subscriptions) that will yield revenue. So why not just sell The Kindle for free or at a very nominal cost. I am sure by now Amazon and other e-ink book sellers, like Sony, have already recovered the initial investment.
Already the Sony Pocket-sized Reader comes pre-loaded with 100 e-books (at least that's what I saw in England in my last recent trip). That sort of reduces the real cost to almost zero. (It is possible that the pre-loaded books are free e-books; not sure about that though). But eventually the costs will come down. because of competition and because it will make better business sense to follow the razor blade model.
Consider this. You can download "Kindle" (the software) on to your PC or iPhone. Soon it will be available for Blackberry. These are free. So why not the hardware Kindle?
What you did not know you could have a kindle on your laptop?
Go here and download kindle and get access to e-books.
It is not the same as buying the Kindle itself. But it is a stopgap. One day Kindle will be available for free.

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