04 Aug

Amazon Kindle: free – to good hands

Kevin Kelly – founder of the magazine Wired – is interested in the future of one of the most popular gadgets.
In October, 2009 John Uokenbah – the fan of electronic spreadsheets and the author of several books and application for Excel, noticed an amusing thing: the price of ebook reader amazon Kindle decreases with such an enviable persistence that the schedule of its falling represents a direct line without the slightest oscillations. Since June, 2010 this line became so plain that if everything goes without changes it will be possible to predict the moment to which Kindle becomes free – November, 2011.

This tendency has interested Kevin Kelly. In 2010 a possibility to ask Jeff Bezos – general director of Amazon about happening with Kindle was presented to him. Bezos smiled and told: «Oh, you’ve noticed it!». And mysteriously smiled again.

The situation with Kindle causes nervous laughter and perturbation at publishers – after all, at least, ebook reader amazon Kindle production costs money, so how it is possible to give it free of charge? And how Amazon will earn on it? Kevin Kelly risked to assume that ebook reader can be given after purchase of a certain amount of electronic books on Amazon.com. But then there were news about even more reasonable decision: Amazon will present Kindle to each Prime-buyer.

The Prime-buyer pays $79 a year for free delivery of orders within two days, and at the last week of subscriptions he got unlimited access to films downloading. This year, in January Amazon made on a risky step: suggested the elite buyers to select any model of Kindle and to buy it, but in case of discontent with a gadget to receive reversely money, but all the same to leave the device to themselves.

This thing became a check of consumer interest before start of more scale program – free distribution of ebook readers to each Prime-subscriber. Last year, in December «the London book magazine» (London Review of Books) published an article about the future of the newspaper industry in which Kindle was mentioned again: «… If New York Times has stopped to print the paper version of the newspaper, he could present ebook reader amazon Kindle to each subscriber on the spared money. And not only the elementary model, but also free approach to a global database. And not only one Kindle- four! And not once- every year! And all this things – proceeding from the most underestimated expenditures on the press».