Amazon today lowered the price of its U.S. Kindle 2 to $259. It also announced an international version of the Kindle 2 for $279—globe-trotting customers are paying more for a more capable radio, but it’s still $20 less than Kindle 2 was yesterday. The price of e-reader hardware is definitely trending downward. If you imagine the profits from an ever-less expensive Kindle converging with the rising costs of selling Kindle bestsellers below cost, the model makes no sense, unless the purpose of the business is to create digital libraries.
With 45+ dedicated e-reader devices on the market, Amazon absolutely must lower its prices aggressively over the the next year to maintain its market share. But, here’s the question: To what end is Amazon driving e-reader pricing downward? Kindle still delivers a much better buying and reading experience than any of the currently shipping e-readers. Sony’s Daily Reader will be comparable, but it will not be out for another month or more. Next year, Plastic Logic, among others will have a Kindle challenger with built-in wireless purchasing features, too.
Remember that Amazon is still losing money on every bestselling book sold through its store. The company pays publishers about $3.60 more than the list price for a bestseller when sales costs are factored into the expense. If each Kindle accounts for just two bestseller sales, the cost of supporting 3 million Kindles in the market rockets past $20 million (see chart, right, which looked better in Excel. The scale should be 50,000 to 3 million, though this logarithmic curve makes the point that every Kindle sold adds to Amazon’s bestseller costs at $3.60 per title sold).
The goal, at this point, is to get more people invested in a Kindle, or, more precisely, a digital library. It’s more than format lock-in,