Unless you’ve been on another planet for the past ten months, you must have seen the buzz surrounding the Amazon Kindle. In February 2009, Amazon launched their Kindle 2 reader. A little later, in June, the large format Kindle DX was released.
In the space of only a few months, the Kindle has become Amazon’s best selling product. It currently enjoys an astonishing 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market. In October 2009, Amazon released the Kindle for international customers in over 100 countries outside America. It seems reasonable to suppose that the Kindle will have a similar level of success in the worldwide market.
The Kindle is now practically synonymous with e-book readers – but it’s not the only reader on the market. Manufacturers of personal consumer electronic devices – such as Sony, Microsoft, Apple and even Barnes and Noble now – all want their share of the market and have their own readers ready for launch in the near future. Competition for this new market is going to be savage. It’s a real compliment to Amazon that almost any e-book reader which shows any potential is instantly dubbed the “Kindle Killer”.
The Kindle 2 is priced at $ 259. That represents a $ 100 reduction on the $ 359 launch price. That’s still a fairly high price. Many industry analysts estimate that a ticket price around the $ 150 mark is what’s required to allow e-book readers to move out of the high tech gadget market and into the mainstream consumer arena. Certainly, the higher levels of competition that looks set for next year will produce a downward pressure on the price of e-book readers, which may mean that the $ 150 price point is reached during 2010.
In the meantime, if you’ve been hankering after a Kindle of your own but feel a little put off by the high price, maybe you could justify your purchase by looking at the bigger picture in terms of cost. As a rule, e-books tend to be quite a bit cheaper than conventional paper volumes. It makes sense – they don’t use paper, ink or bindings and there are none of the transportation costs associated with shipping a physical product. If you read a book a week then you could pretty quickly offset the purchase price of the Kindle device.
Even better than cheap e-books, you can download a large selection of totally free e-books direct from Amazon’s Kindle store. Many of the free books are classics which are now out of copyright – Gulliver’s Travels, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Sherlock Holmes are just a few examples. You will also find more recent releases, possibly on special offer from publishers. In addition to completely free e-books, there are many books included among Amazon’s 360,000 Kindle titles which are available for a purely nominal fee – $ 0.01 is really quite common. You could very easily get the cost of your Kindle reader back just by using free, or low price, books for your Kindle.
Find out how to quickly and legally download free Kindle books and make your Amazon Kindle reader pay for itself in no time.
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