Amazon Takes a Leap of Faith with Kindle

By Nathan Statz

November 21, 2007: The world of electronic books wouldn’t be every major online retailer’s cup of tea, but for Washington based Amazon that’s exactly what they’re attempting to buy into with their new Kindle product.

Electronic books (E-book’s) have always had the simple problem of not being as enjoyable as the real thing. No matter how hard technology tries to emulate the written page, so far nothing has proved as popular and successful as words inked onto paper. Despite this, Amazon have released a new E-book reader called Kindle, which aims to entice readers with bestselling titles priced at half the price of their hard cover competition.

“The device itself has limitations that won’t help its cause. Therefore, we don’t see the Kindle igniting the e-book market in the near future. However, we do like the idea of taking care of the end to end user experience. Hopefully, potentially larger scale initiatives will follow.” Said Steven Hartley, Senior Analyst at Ovum.

According to Hartley, one of the interesting features about the Kindle offering is that it will enable users to download content wirelessly over Sprint’s national EVDO network without the need to sync with a PC. But for Kindle users there will be no need to sign up to the Sprint service as Amazon promises to take care of it. The wireless connection can be used to download purchased content or browse Wikipedia for free.

“According to the Association of American Publishers, less than 1% of sales by US publishers in 2005 were ebooks, suggesting that the Kindle faces an uphill struggle.” Said Hartley.

Kindle will be put in direct competition with Sony’s Reader which is priced $100 lower but isn’t as technologically advanced as Amazon’s product, at least not yet. Fortunately it isn’t all troublesome for Kindle, as the ability to access E-books for purchase automatically means avoiding a trip to the book store, a convenience that is sure to appeal to some users.

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