‘Amazon’s Kindle: Very cool, really easy,’ says Publishers Weekly
“The Kindle has three surefire selling points—title selection, pricing and Amazon’s nifty Whispernet wireless network—that give it an advantage over devices like the Sony Reader and the iLiad.” - Publishers Weekly’s home-page summary of its overwhelmingly favorable review headlined Amazon’s Kindle: Very Cool, Really Easy.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
>>>title selection, pricing
Anyone want to waste a week or so of their life *really* combing through the amazon Kindle catalog? I really have deep doubts that their *affordable* selection of titles is this huge monster the PR has made it out to be.
I keep wondering how many of that “selection” have prices like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Strategies-for-Software-Companies/dp/B000OT7TTM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1196454429&sr=1-1
(The first title you see in the Kindle bookstore when sorting by Price Highest-Lowest.)
November 30th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
I can only speak for titles published by BooksForABuck.com, my company. Amazon is offering these at a significant discount to my list price (regular readers know that BooksForABuck.com sets aggressive list prices because we believe in affordable eBooks). Amazon is taking a smaller margin on these books and, I think, on most of its Kindle books. I think this is a well thought out way to jump-start sales of this device. Whether Kindle eBooks stay low-priced is another question. Certainly Amazon’s costs to inventory, ship, worry about returns, buy warehouses, etc. for eBooks is dramatically lower than for paper books and it does make sense that they’d be willing to accept slightly lower margins for this business than they do on their more labor-intense businesses.
Naturally, since our books are included in the Kindle list, I believe they have a wonderful selection.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
December 1st, 2007 at 1:02 pm
>>>Naturally, since our books are included in the Kindle list, I believe they have a wonderful selection.
What’s the overlap between yours and Sony Connect?