The $99 Kindle | Hacker News Reader

The $99 Kindle

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I would be stunned and amazed if e-ink readers were NOT $99 this Christmas.

Hell, I bet next (2011) Christmas you'll be able to get them for free (eg. buy 1 Kindle for $100 and get a $100 e-book gift card free). The money's in the content.

I'm thinking the offer is "Amazon Prime gets you free express shipping on all your orders from Amazon for only $99 a year. Sign up before X and we'll send you a Kindle absolutely free."

Think of it: Prime increases average customer value through the freaking roof, since it causes people to move non-Amazon spending to Amazon. Kindle is the same way. They have complementary value propositions: get what you want faster and cheaper. Prime is a subscription billing service, too, and a Kindle in active use might as well be.

Too complicated, just sell the Kindle for 99$. Easy to understand, easy to gift. Bundling Prime with it makes it harder to gift.

ps: I let me prime subscription expire in the hope that it would make me buy less stuff on Amazon. No shipping costs really does make it easier to buy.

I just got Prime free as a student and it is very addicting. Almost anything you want is a sweet sweet 2 days away. My bank account is not as happy...

Come Christmas season 2011, the e-reader market is going to look like the MP3 player market in 2005. You're going to see Coby-branded e-readers with horrible silver-painted plastic and 90s-budget-PC industrial design at Menards on Black Friday for $29.95.

These prices coming down have pretty much guaranteed an ebook reader is the next thing I'm buying. When they were $300 reading on my computer screen didn't seem too bad, but for (soon) under $100 I'm sold.

Anyone have any particular recommendations that aren't the Kindle? I avoid devices that are as locked down as it is. I don't really care about wireless, I want an e-ink (or comparably easy-on-the-eyes screen), and decent PDF support would be nice. The Sony Reader Touch and the Nook both interesting, although there seem to be a ton of other ones out there made by companies I've never heard of. Any suggestions?

I'm puzzled that you think the Kindle is locked down - it supports almost all of the major ebook formats. Only buying Kindle books on Amazon will entail DRM, supplying your own files is as good as it is on any other e-reader.

EPUB isn't exactly a minor omission.

Amazon wants to control the whole experience from content down to the physical device. They want to do the same thing Apple's done with iOS. They're not Apple, so they may not succeed, but I'm not going to support them until I'm reasonably confident that's not the way they're heading. I don't own an iP{hone,od,ad} either for the same reason.

It's a fairly minor omission when you can use a tool like calibre to convert your EPUB files to MOBI.

Watch out if you're looking to read mostly PDFs. I'm in your position, and I found the Nook to be a beautiful device that was completely unsuitable; since the device can't reflow or scale fonts on PDFs, the screen just turned out to be too small to read all the PDFs I tried it with (even after manually trimming off all the margins and page numbers.)

I'm considering buying a Kindle DX, which I believe would be ideal, but it's hard for me to justify that when Pixel Qi hybrid tablets may be coming out in the next year.

$99 has been my price point for it all along. If the kindle books were cheaper I'd spend a bit more for the reader -- but at $9 a book (and you can't share them like you can with a nook) I want a relatively inexpensive reader.

Also note that other publishers do publish books in kindle format, Baen books for example has their free library which includes every format under the sun.

I saw the 139 price and thought exactly that: wait till Xmas and get it for 99$ (and throw in some free books perhaps). Perfect.

Methinks the iPad caused a renaissance for the digital book & Amazon is doing everything to make sure that their eBook format does not become obsolete. Amazon has been advertising the Kindle app for the iPad all over the place & it only makes sense to aggressively reduce the price one the readers. The money is in the books, not the readers. Or rather, the money is in the convenience of digital distribution. Apple convinced people to pay for convenience and Amazon is trying to hitch a ride.

I'm still scratching my head over why everyone else seems to support ePub but Amazon can't be bothered to add it to the Kindle.

It's the reason why I went with the nook.

Amazon sell kindle, people only buy books for it from Amazon, Amazon make money - Bezos buys new holiday island (eg Australia)

Amazon support open format ebooks, people buy kindle then get books everywhere else - Amazon make no money and Bezos forced to buy Grenada instead.

Amazon does support open formats, just not ePub. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Well, other people are using ePub plus DRM. Which makes it simple to support ePub without DRM. And it's not like Amazon can "support" ePub and have iBooks work on it due to the DRM.

Is he saying that Amazon will sell the Kindle at a loss, so they can control the market where they sell ebooks at a loss? And what, make it up on volume? I think they'll have to trim down the features on the low end version to get production costs way down. Maybe get rid of the keyboard.

Since we're still in land-grab mode in the ebook business, selling at a loss might make all kinds of sense.

Once users amass a virtual bookshelf, you've got them locked in pretty hard, especially if they use the Kindle to read it. If the iPad becomes the e-reader of choice, lock-in is weaker because you can use all of the major bookstores on it.

Does the Kindle support complex science books well? I bought one statistics book and the equations and graphs do not scale with the text.

For fiction I still prefer small paperback books. Easy to swap with friends and simple to use.

At $100, I'm definitely getting one for Christmas. My wife's and my own miserly tendencies are nearly obliterated at that point.

If I'm getting it for someone as a holiday gift, I'd wait.

If I'm buying it for myself, I'd buy it now. $40 price premium to have it 3 months sooner? Seems worth it to me, $40 isn't much of a big deal and you can do a lot of reading in that time.

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