Apple’s IPad Launch Provokes E-Book Reader Price Cuts
The Amazon Kindle reader has been a major factor in the development of the e-book reader and e-book market. Amazon’s original Kindle (now sometimes referred to as the K1) launched in November 2007. The Kindle 2.0 was released in February of 2009 and the large format Kindle DX followed in the summer of the same year.
The Kindle readers dominated the market and took a 60% share of all e-book reader sales in the USA. The Sony reader, which was actually launched in 2006 before the Kindle, followed in second place with a share of around 35%. Other manufacturers quickly saw the potential of the rapidly developing e-book reader market and either launched or updated readers of their own in order to secure a share of the market.
Companies such as Sony, Barnes and Noble, Bookeen, Plastic Logic and iRex did their best to get their share of the new and fast developing e-book market, but the Kindle’s dominance looked to be pretty much unassailable. It was only with the launch of Apple’s iPad that the Kindle had any real competition – despite the fact that the two devices are very different.
Since the unveiling of the iPad, e-book reader prices have dropped quite some way. The Kindle 2.0 is selling for just $ 189 at the moment, a significant reduction over the original $ 359 launch price of February 2009. The newly upgrade Kindle DX, with a new high contrast display, is now available for just $ 379, reduced from $ 489. Barnes and Noble have also dropped the price of their Nook reader from $ 259 to $ 199.
Although the iPad seems to have provoked a round of price cuts among the manufacturers of e-book readers, the same cannot be said about the price of the e-books to read on these devices. Prior to the launch of the iPad, Apple had negotiated a deal with the major publishing houses which let them set the price of their e-book editions at pretty much whatever they wanted – as long as they did not allow the same e-book to be offered at a lower price on any other platform. This was welcomed by the publishers, who had been dissatisfied with Amazon’s policy of pricing all e-books for $ 9.99 or less.
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. It’s difficult to see any other explanation for the fact that they have made Kindle books available on such a wide variety of different devices. Right now, you can read Kindle books on the PC, the Mac, your Blackberry, the iPod Touch, the iPad and any mobile device which runs 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 favour 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.
