A few thoughts on the new Kindles
Today Amazon announced three new products: a $199 tablet, a $99 touch screen e-reader, and a $79 e-reader. While I rarely comment on product releases I think Amazon’s trio of new Kindle’s brings up a few themes to watch:
- Explosion of E-book Sales, and Amazon control: For the first time this year e-book sales overtook hardback sales. However, for e-books really to become dominant I think the price of e-readers being over $99 has largely been prohibitive.Amazon is able to leverage their online store to offer partially ad-supported e-readers for Amazon has two readers priced at $99 and $79. (Without “special offers” the prices jump $40 and $30 respectively). I think this year we are going to see tremendous growth in E-book sales, with Amazon’s store and terms of use becoming the leading example. Even furniture manufacturers have taken note, with Ikea redesigning their top selling bookshelf to account for less books. However, we will also see Amazon in a position to use their market power to define terms of service of e-book use and leverage against with publishers.
- Growth of Interactive magazines: After the iPad was released some publishers experimented with presenting print media in a new way, with Wired offering a spiffy design on their iPad app and an app for Alice in Wonderland garnering rave reviews. By offering a flash ready table for $199 Amazon is offering a more affordable platform for interactive “print” media. Knight Ridder was predicting the coming of the tablet newspaper in 1994 but I think the Kindle Fire has a low enough price point to make this more appealing.
- Fork of Android market offerings: The Kindle Fire is Android 2.1 based, but those keeping track will not that this is considerably behind the latest 3.2 (with a new 3.3 coming this fall). Amazon has chosen to use an older operating system that can run on cheaper hardware and build their own skin. I think this will start a trend of tablet manufacturers trying to compete on their “OS,” that while based on Android, will have different features and quite possibly run different apps and subscriptions.
- Privacy Concerns: part of the Kindle Fire’s ability to run on a slower processor is the dependence on the cloud for processing power. Amazon Silk, the OS, will coordinate with servers to process HTML 5, Java, and the like. However, part of this depends on remember, and predicting, a user’s browsing habits to cache the latest websites users visit. Privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani and Law Professor Jonathan I. Ezor have both noted that the terms of service for Amazon Silk state: “Amazon Silk also temporarily logs web addresses
