Why Amazon Will Continue To Shape The E-Book Market For The Foreseeable Future
Posted by Hamish Hayward in Uncategorized, tags: computers, ebook readers, ebooks, electrical items, ereaders, gadgets, personal electronics, technology, UncategorizedAmazon has been an important, quite possibly the most important, player in the development of digital publishing using both their Kindle reader family and their huge library of Kindle books as development and marketing tools. November 2007 saw the launch of the original Kindle. Amazon followed up with the upgraded Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009, and the large display Kindle DX model launched in the summer of 2009.
The Kindle readers dominated the market with a 60% share of all American e-book reader sales. Sony’s PRS reader - which was actually available in 2006, some time before the Kindle - followed in second place with a 35% market share. Other companies quickly saw the huge potential of the rapidly developing e-book reader market and either launched or updated their own readers in order to get a share of the available sales.
Competitors like Plastic Logic, Sony, Bookeen, iRex and Barnes and Noble fought for their share of the rapidly growing market, but Amazon’s lead position seemed to be almost impregnable. It was only with the launch of the Apple iPad that any credible competition emerged - slightly surprising since the two devices are very different and are, you would suppose, aimed at different market segments.
Nevertheless, since the release of the iPad, e-book reader prices have pretty much gone into free fall. The Kindle 2.0, which retailed for $ 359 at its February 2009 launch is now priced at just $ 189. The Kindle DX, which has just had a mini makeover and now sports a new higher contrast screen, has had its price slashed from $ 489 to $ 379. Still a pricey piece of kit, but a lot cheaper than before and also way cheaper than even the entry level iPad (which also has a monthly connection fee associated with it). The price of the Barnes and Noble Nook reader has also dropped to just $ 199.
Whilst the price of e-book readers may be falling, the same cannot be said about the price of the e-books which these devices are used to read. Again, Apple had a hand in this. Apple had, in advance of the launch of the iPad, set up their own book store and negotiated a pricing deal with the major publishing houses which basically allowed them to fix the price of their e-book editions at whatever level they wished. The only rider being that they could not offer the same e-book version at a lower price on any other platform. This effectively put paid to Amazon’s policy of pricing e-books at $ 9.99 or lower and was very popular amongst the publishing companies.
Amazon had to back down from this - but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for them, or Barnes and Noble for that matter. Amazon has always appeared to be more interested in selling books - and e-books - rather than hardware. That’s the only possible explanation for the fact that they have made it possible to read Kindle books on so many different devices. At the moment, you can read Kindle books on the PC, the Mac, your Blackberry, the iPod Touch, the iPad and any mobile device running Android. So companies like Barnes and Noble, Amazon and now Apple, who have a stake in the future sale of e-books over the life of a reader, can afford to sell the hardware cheaper and profit over the life of the device.
It may be that the future pricing of e-book readers and e-books will tend to favor such companies over manufacturers who are involved only in hardware production. Looking at the number of different devices which Kindle books can be read on, you would have to suspect that, whether or not the iPad becomes the reader of choice for many users, Amazon will continue to have a huge say in the future of books and e-books for the foreseeable future.
Check out the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.
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