Kindle's bigger screen and higher price may make it a hard sell
Online retail giant Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveils the Kindle DX, a large-screen version of its popular Kindle electronic reader designed for newspapers, magazines and textbooks (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)
Juthymas Harntha reads books and news on all sorts of gadgets, from the Kindle to the iPod Touch to the BlackBerry. That doesn’t mean she’s excited about a larger, pricier Kindle that Amazon.com announced this week.
“It didn’t tempt me in the least,” said Harntha, a 35-year-old lawyer who lives in London and owns the original Kindle. “I can’t imagine lots of people will go for it because of the price and because it so quickly followed on the second one.”
Amazon’s new Kindle DX, announced three months after the second-generation Kindle debuted, is designed for reading newspapers and textbooks. While the bigger screen will make reading easier, fans of electronic readers have grown accustomed to a smaller format. And the $489 price tag, $130 more than the Kindle 2, may make the new device more of a niche product, said Joshua Topolsky, editor-in-chief at Engadget, a blog focused on consumer electronics.
“It’s expensive and it’s competing with another product that they make already, so it’s got a little of an uphill battle when it comes to being able to sell it to Joe Consumer,” Topolsky said.
The first two Kindles opened up a business for Amazon.com that may generate sales of $1.2 billion by 2010, according to Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup in San Francisco. When Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Kindle on her show last year, it quickly sold out. Amazon.com took preorders for months before releasing the second version in February. The company will continue to sell the smaller Kindle 2 when the DX model goes on sale this summer.
‘Hefty Price’
“The Kindle 2 is ideal,” said Louis Loeffler, 49, a Kindle user who lives in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. He splits his time as a doctoral student and a professor. “It’s the perfect size for me. It’s like carrying a paperback book.”
The timing of the new device’s release may make it hard to persuade current customers to upgrade, since many of them just ponied up $359 for the Kindle 2, said Dan Dubno, who reviews technology on the Web site Gadgetoff.com.
“The real big problem is that it has a fairly hefty price tag and I think that is going to be really a barrier to many, many people,” Dubno said. “I can seriously anticipate the price will come down over a period of years.”
Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon.com, said the Kindle DX is a “great value,” considering it has a 9.7- inch (24.6-centimeter) screen and high-speed wireless access. The majority of books are $9.99 or less, and Amazon.com covers the cost of wireless downloads, he said. The company doesn’t disclose Kindle sales.
Quick Release
Amazon.com was quick to release the new Kindle because other companies, such as Plastic Logic and Polymer Vision, are releasing similar devices this year, said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sony also makes an electronic book reader and has a partnership with Google.
The new Kindle may be more popular with students who lug around weighty textbooks. Five universities have agreed to use the Kindle as part of a study. They plan to measure how well students perform with electronic textbooks.
At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, about 50 students will download chemistry, computer science and English textbooks onto the new Kindle. Their academic performance will be evaluated against others in the same classes that use traditional textbooks.
Easier to Read
Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western, said she likes the new Kindle’s larger screen because it makes text easier to read. She’s undecided whether she will give up her old Kindle and buy the Kindle DX.
“When you’re reading a novel, you may not value the larger screen size as much as when you’re reading something that has a lot of text and graphics,” Snyder said.
During the holiday season, Kindle devices were in short supply, pushing prices for used ones as high as $1,500 on sites like EBay. Now prices on EBay max out at about $400.
Brian Bird sold a Kindle at a profit before Christmas and bought the second generation this year. He’s not interested in the DX.
“I’m not too old yet, so I don’t need that big a screen,” he said. “And I’m not reading textbooks on it.”
Others can’t get enough of the Kindle. Elie Seidman, 34, bought the original model last summer. He liked it so much that he started giving them out as gifts.
Seidman, chief executive officer of Oyster.com, a New York- based travel company, went on to buy a Kindle 2 as well. Now the entrepreneur says he’ll get the latest one too.
“I’ll definitely buy one to try it out,” Seidman said. “For me, the whole thing has been a game-changer. I literally don’t buy books that I can’t buy in Kindle.” (Bloomberg)
- Joseph Galante and Dina Bass
