This goes for Amazon, B&N, Sony and anyone else who thinks the game is being played only by 3-4 outlets for a bunch of dedicated devices only. The e-book market is much more varied than that, and the likely result of the Big Boys waging war with each other might be for everyone to just get out of their way and deal with the little guys instead. So far, I have felt little incentive to buy e-books from the Big Pub sites, and I have no interest in buying a Kindle. These “price wars” will hurt them far more than they will hurt me.

Whether B&N’ll try to justify their prices with “liberal” DRM restrictions or just simply pretend they aren’t higher (their original approach) remains to be seen but odds are that anything short of zero-DRM will have no significant impact other than, maybe, encouraging greater DRM-stripping.

Also, I wouldn’t be so sure that the reader itself, the Nook, is being sold at a loss. The expected price merely matches Amazon and is more expensive than most of the second tier gadgets, most of which can readily plug in to the B&N ADE ebook ecosystem. All these gadgets have similar technology inside and are built using more or less the same components and it shows in both the performance and the price. Nook is competitively priced but it is hardly priced as a true loss leader. Not even the Sony 300 can make that claim.

Finally, everybody is so focused on “killing Kindle” they seem to forget there are other players out there, other markets, other platforms. And that the real war isn’t between B&N and Amazon but between the publishers and the consumers over the perceived value and baseline pricing of ebooks; whether ebooks are a premium product like hardcovers or a commodity like paperbacks; whether pricing will be cost-plus or soak-the-reader.

We’re not bystanders, we’re participants voting with our wallets.

Worth remembering: Amazon’s $9.99 baseline ebook pricing is no bargain. Yet the publishers expect us to go higher. How’s a $12 baseline strike you? $15? Does anybody think prices would go down and DRM vais if Kindle ceased to exist?

Let’s not lose the forest for the trees; the (unlikely) death of Kindle will only result in (permanently) higher ebook prices for everybody and a stunting of the industry, which is what the publishers want. You don’t have to be a fan of Amazon to realize they are the only thing standing between consumers and truly obnoxious pricing.

Let’s stick with the basics, shall we? Competition is good; more is better (Welcome B&N), less is bad (Let’s hope Sony stays).

@David: I believe the strategy is about selling the copier at a loss, and selling the ink cartridges at high prices to make up the profit. Personally, I disagree here: I don’t see any of these strategies as “giving away” e-book readers at a loss, nor charging exhorbitant rates for all e-books… in fact, I see the opposite, charging high rates for readers, and going market prices for most e-books.

However, there are other e-book business models that are even sillier, and even more doomed. Like this one I just stumbled across:

http://tinyurl.com/yk4nxhn

I had to read it twice to be sure they were serious. That anyone could so totally miss the whole idea of e-books and the internet is beyond belief.