May 21 2011
Get A $25 Discount On The Standard Kindle Price
Amazon’s Kindle 3 is the market leading e-book reader right now, by some way, and it looks as if Amazon’s latest initiative will increase the popularity of the Kindle even more. Customers will be able to get a $ 25 discount on a Wi-Fi only Kindle by choosing an advert supported model which starts shipping on May 3. The Kindle with Special Offers replaces pictures of famous authors on the screensaver with adverts and special offers.
The variations between the new Kindle and the regular Kindle 3 aren’t basically that huge. The Kindle with Special Offers sells for $ 114 and, apart from the sponsored screen savers, it is identical in all aspects to the standard Wi-Fi only Kindle which retails for $ 139. As the adverts only appear on screen savers and menu pages, they should not intrude upon the reading experience. Anyone who dislikes the thought of Kindle adverts is free to choose the standard model of course.
It’s a matter of personal choice at the end of the day. Some people will gladly accept the ads in return for a price reduction; whereas others will prefer to pay a little bit more for a Kindle without ads. The level of discount offered will probably have a strong influence on where the split appears. Whether or not a $ 25 discount is quite enough to encourage a large number of customers to accept ads on their Kindle readers is debatable.
Which, quite naturally, begs the question; how much of a reduction would it take to make you interested in a sponsored Kindle? Should a sponsored Kindle be supplied free of charge? That would depend upon how successful the advertising was and how much business it generated.
Many of the adverts will probably be for products directly available on the Amazon website. However, Amazon has a number of other companies lined up to advertise on the Kindle, including Procter and Gamble, Visa and General Motors. It seems likely that, with the correct product, the Kindle may well provide a good return on investment for advertisers – especially if their product can be bought straight from the Amazon website.
It’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that, if the return on investment were to be sufficiently high, sponsorship could well result in a discount larger than $ 25. So, is a free Kindle a realistic proposition? It will be totally dependent upon the economic success of the Kindle with special offers approach.
Neither is it out of the question that we might see some similar arrangement on other e-book readers in future. Amazon certainly has an advantage over many other ebook reader manufacturers due to the fact that the Kindle may be used to purchase special offers directly. However, companies like Barnes and Noble could set something similar up and may well find it profitable.
It’s relatively easy to overlook just how recent a development the e-book reader and e-book market is. There are a number of different ways that both e-book readers and e-books could be priced, and there’s no reason to assume that the methods we are witnessing at this point will continue in perpetuity. It will be interesting to see just how much further Amazon will push their special offer Kindle and how the other e-book reader manufacturers will react.
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