Amazon drops price on Kindle, releases international version

Jacqueline DiOrio 9 Oct, 2009 at 2:33pm ET Article published in Tech

When the Kindle first came out in 2007, it cost a prohibitive $399. Today, after a $40 price drop from Amazon, it costs only $259.

According to a report from the Associated Press, the price drop came Wednesday as a result of the success that the Kindle has had in the market. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claims that the Kindle is Amazon’s best-selling product.

The Kindle will also soon arrive in the form of an international version, priced at $279. The international Kindle works in 100 countries, and will start shipping Monday to G20 nations like Germany, Japan, and Australia. The Kindle DX will follow the international Kindle some time next year. The Kindle DX is slightly larger than the normal Kindle, and is more formatted towards textbooks and periodicals.

The international Kindle will be able to download anywhere in the world courtesy of AT&T. We’re wondering if that means US consumers will soon be able to buy into international wireless downloads as well. At present, US customers must connect to a PC to download content abroad.

International customers don’t have it all better, though. International Kindle downloads will cost about 40% more than titles downloaded in the US. Consumers are also worried that prices will be higher still because the international Kindle uses the US-based AT&T, which may levy roaming charges.

The price drop for the US Kindle and the introduction of the international Kindle appear to be Amazon’s attempts to compete in a growing market. Both Sony and Irex Technologies will have wireless e-readers by the end of 2009, while Plastic Logic Ltd. has plans for one as well.

Sony’s products will come in addition to the existing $199 “Pocket Edition” e-reader, and a larger $299 touch screen model, neither of which downloads wirelessly.

It will be interesting to see how the market shapes up once Amazon encounters competition in both hardware and e-books. The international Kindle goes on sale October 19th and can be purchased on Amazon.

Comments

9 Oct 2009 ~ 2:38pm chrisWhite This is great news, I know a bunch of people who have wanted a Kindle but don't live in the US. I have to say, I love my Kindle, I really more textbooks and the like were on it
9 Oct 2009 ~ 3:01pm DrLiam Wait, can you use this for school textbooks? Is it cheaper? This could be interesting.
9 Oct 2009 ~ 3:53pm AlexDeGruven Some colleges are starting to play with it as an option for students.

Since there's no printing costs, in theory, it could drastically reduce the price of textbooks. In practice, however, the cost will probably only be lowered about 5% because people like making money.
9 Oct 2009 ~ 4:14pm chrisWhite DrLiam,

Yes and no. This semester not a single one of my textbooks were on the Kindle store. Last semester a few of them were available online as PDFs which came across decently but lost a lot of the PDF formatting (after nuking the DRM).

However, the Kindle DX looks like the perfect device for textbooks as it handles PDFs natively and has the screen size for it textbook formats. If you can get your textbooks for the device it would pay for itself and it's much easier to search, bookmark and grab excerpts from.
10 Oct 2009 ~ 4:19pm chrisWhite So here's my question, the Kindle 2 doesn't turn on or off (it's wireless does) and virtually the only time it uses even a slight bit of power is when it changes a page. So, you can't turn the thing off when you're taking off and descending on a plane, is it okay to continue to flip the pages? Assuming that the edge is off the entire time.

The only four flights I've taken it on the flight attendants didn't seem to care.
10 Oct 2009 ~ 11:51pm GnomeQueen You can't turn it on or off? Why not? That seems exceedingly silly to me.
11 Oct 2009 ~ 12:01am Thrax Electronic paper retains its image when power is removed. Voltage is only required to change the image (flip the page).

If the wireless is off, there's nothing that ebook could possibly do to compromise the plane. Even then, there's a significant body of evidence to suggest that FAA regs regarding wireless devices is complete bullshit.
11 Oct 2009 ~ 2:04am CrazyJoe Yea... Mythbusters did an episode on that and they showed that it doesn't interfere with anything...
11 Oct 2009 ~ 11:12am chrisWhite Thanks Thrax, you described it perfectly.

Didn't Mexico get rid of those regulations recently?
11 Oct 2009 ~ 1:35pm drasnor

Crazy Joe wrote:

Yea... Mythbusters did an episode on that and they showed that it doesn't interfere with anything...

I saw that episode and the result was that US CDMA phones don't interfere with anything... but that US GSM phones make radio navigation essentially impossible.

At any rate, for $260 up front and $10 per title I can buy a lot of conventional books. I'm not seeing the value.

-drasnor
11 Oct 2009 ~ 2:17pm mas0n

drasnor wrote:

At any rate, for $260 up front and $10 per title I can buy a lot of conventional books. I'm not seeing the value.

From a purely economic perspective, actual paper books are still a better deal. The value for me personally is

a) Instant delivery.
b) Portability.
c) Space. We only have a 1600 sq ft house and are always trying to find new places for bookshelves/books. Whenever we have moved in the past, half our boxes are books.
11 Oct 2009 ~ 4:32pm Annes I just really don't like the idea of my ability to read being hindered by battery life - no matter how long that battery life may be.
12 Oct 2009 ~ 1:14am chrisWhite Space was a huge thing for me, I ended up selling off about 200 books on Amazon which paid for the Kindle. At the time I was shooting for owning about 100 items, now I think the ideal for me is 250. 1 Kindle = a lot of books.
12 Oct 2009 ~ 4:38am Snarkasm Using a US cell carrier as the means of downloading books abroad. GREAT idea, Amazon.
12 Oct 2009 ~ 10:39am chrisWhite So long as Amazon's the one that gets billed for it
12 Oct 2009 ~ 11:24am GnomeQueen They had problems getting an international wireless carrier, which I believe led them to use AT&T. I wouldn't be suprised if the pressure from other companies releasing their own E-Readers also increased the desire to get a carrier from SOMEWHERE, just so they could get the international reader out first. We'll have to see what the roaming charges end up being, but speaking from experience, I question the signal strength of AT&T globally. I was in England- two years ago, to be fair- and through AT&T I had signal only one day, despite the fact that I upgraded to an international plan. I spoke to Orange in London- one of the British cell phone services that AT&T is supposed to connect to- and they told me that AT&T users had spotty connections in England, and there was no way that they would be able to tell me when or not I'd be able to connect. Considering I was in LONDON, only the biggest and most important city in all of England, I assumed that I would be able to get service there, but I did not. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
12 Oct 2009 ~ 8:43pm drasnor Well, I have to admit I'm not objective here either. I've been using my OLPC as an e-reader for a few years and have a healthy stack of PDFs from Fictionwise et al. The batteries last 8 hours or so with the wireless radio turned off and backlight off or at minimum. The display on the OLPC is incredible; I wish I could get that screen on a more powerful netbook.

-drasnor