November 30, 2007
The blogosphere punishes neglect. I caught up with the always-enjoyable LiveDigitally to discover that it’s had a makeover (I like!) and a fine piece by Jeremy Toeman on why the Kindle will fail. Here’s the rub, though. Jeremy is using mass market breakthrough — millions of units per year — as his criterion. In fact, Kindle can be a profitable business for Amazon at much lower volumes, and can be an effective enough customer retention tool that Amazon is inclined to keep it around as long as customer spending is profitable enough to offset bandwidth subsidization for things items such as free chapters and Web pages.
The scenario of needing Kindle’s EV-DO book-buying capabilities before one heads off on a flight may not be so common per se, but one place where Amazon will be very happy to have EV-DO working is at the doorstep of — indeed, even inside — every Barnes & Noble and Border’s.
Tags: amazon kindle