We saw Amazon drop their price of the Kindle to align to the Nook and now Sony has dropped the prices on its Pocket Edition from $169 to $149, the Touch Edition from $199 to $169 and the 3G Daily Edition is now $299 from $349.
Our take is that this, is too little too late and they have to break the $99 price point to be attractive. Will anyone be prepared to cut to the bone, or run a loss leader to capture the market? The problem with so many ‘lookie likies’ is that they don’t make money on the sales of books, only on the devices and as the price wars heat up then some will go to the wall. It is hard to see anyone but Kobo, Amazon and B&N surviving these wars if they get as hot as they must do soon. Forget the social networking, forget they fancy add ons and split screens, for eInk readers to make it through winter, they have to make money out of content sales.
How long before one starts to give them away to schools, institutions etc. Remember they also will soon face OLPC tablet offer at the low end and more Android tablets at the top end and after all said and done, they are still one channel black and white TVs, in a multi channel, Technicolor and HD world.
No comments:
Post a Comment