Amazon Cuts Kindle Price, Offers Internation Edition
Posted by Sam Churchill on October 7th, 2009Amazon announced today that their Kindle 2, with a standard 6″ display, is now available internationally for $279 while the Kindle 2 for the U.S. market has been lowered to $259.
The NY Times says the new Kindle is physically identical to Amazon’s current Kindle and will begin shipping on October 19. The main difference: it will use the wireless networks of AT&T and its international roaming partners, instead of Sprint. Sprint’s domestic CDMA network is incompatible with most mobile networks outside of North America.
The price of the domestic Kindle was cut in July, from $359 to $299, to match the prices of rivals like the Sony Reader, whose least expensive e-reader now costs $199.
Kindle’s rivals now include Barnes & Noble’s alliance with Plastic Logic and their iRex ebook, the Sony Readers; AUO which hopes to sell a $100 e-book reader by 2011, and China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile carrier, which said last month it would soon begin selling several kinds of electronic reading devices.
International users of the new Kindle will have a slightly smaller collection of around 200,000 English-language books to choose from, and their catalogs will be tailored to the country they purchased the device in. Amazon said it would sell books from a range of publishers including Bloomsbury, Hachette, HarperCollins, Lonely Planet and Simon & Schuster. Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate, is still negotiating, according to the NY Times.
Bezos didn’t talk about Kindle sales, but said Kindle titles were now 48 percent of total book sales in instances where Amazon sold both a digital and physical copy of a book. That was up from 35 percent last May.
Barnes & Noble signed a strategic agreement with AT&T to provide free Wi-Fi to all its customers. No AT&T subscription required. The company hopes to bring more customers into the store, and expand its current e-book catalog of 700,000 titles — 500,000 of which are free public domain e-books from Google — over the coming months.
TechCrunch has an e-book reader cheat sheet, comparing the Kindle (6″ screen, $259), Kindle DX (9.7″ screen, $489), Sony Reader Daily Edition (7″ screen, $399), and the Irex DR800SG (8.1″ screen, $399).
In July Barnes & Noble said it will also be the exclusive provider of digital books for another e-reader from Plastic Logic. That device will use a wireless connection from AT&T. Both the Plastic Logic Reader and the iRex Reader, unlike the Kindle, can access Wi-Fi hot spots. Sony will likely add that feature soon.
Forrester expects that 3 million eReaders will be sold in 2009 with 30% of these sold during the holiday season. They expect sales in 2010 to double, bringing cumulative sales of eReaders to 10 million by year-end 2010.
source : dailywireless.org
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