I have a Kindle Fire but I’ve been wanting a regular Kindle for a really long time. They’ve been priced at $69 for what seems like forever (at least a year, which is when I started looking into purchasing one). I suppose I should just buy a used one. But still, Amazon is pushing Fires and Paperwhites and 3gs and Touches &etc out the door by the gazillion. Why not make vanilla Kindles cheaper?
I got mine for something like $300, and it was the second generation, not the first, which was more expensive. Sixty nine dollars seems pretty fucking cheap to me! You can’t get a decent iPod for that!
They are already selling them at a loss. How much cheaper do you think they should be?
The original Kindle cost $400 at launch just a little more than four years ago, that’s a pretty big price drop, especially considering that this is an overall improved unit. $70 is less than the cost of 9 paperbacks, and the Kindle is still the best e-reader around IMO, so that’s a very good price in my mind.
They tend to drop the price on Kindles by selling “refurbished” units or selling with a coupon. For example, some time last year they sold the Kindle for $50 if you had the amazon credit card and typed in the right promo code. They don’t really have any straight up competition at the $69 price point so they try to price discriminate instead.
Teeheehee 69…
$69 seems low enough to me- if I didn’t have a 3G Kindle already I’d buy one for that price. What would your ideal price be, realistically?
The kindle was $300-400 in the first and second generation. The third generation is when the price dropped, it was only about $139 then from what I recall because I got mine in the 3rd generation (christmas of 2010 I believe). So the prices have already been cut in half, then cut in half again over the life of the kindle. The $69 version is the vanilla kindle.
As for when the next price cut will come, I don’t know. But prices have already declined drastically over the last 4 years. My 3G broke (I stepped on it), but I can get an ad supported 5th generation for half what my 3G cost.
Is making a kindle for less than $69 going to open up the market? I don’t know if there are large numbers of people who won’t buy one at $69 but would buy one for $35. So I don’t know what incentive there is to drop the price anytime soon.
You can check craigslist for a used one. But you will only save $20 or so doing that, better to buy one new and know its history.
Fair enough! I didn’t know it was that expensive to start with. Just that since I’ve been eyeing it, the price hasn’t changed at all. And I figured it would have.
Didn’t they just drop the price from $79 to $69 in August or September? That’s when I bought mine. I was considering buying one, but the price drop sealed the deal for me.
Don’t know if any of you are old enough to remember, but back in the day you could sign up and get 12 tapes/CDs for a penny! Of course, there was a catch - there is always a catch. You had to buy an additional certain number of tapes/CDs for full price over the next year or so.
I mention this as I have always wondered why they don’t give away FREE Kindles, with a contract to buy 20 books or something at full price.
For instance, printers these days are practically free - they make their real money with the toner cartridges. So why not just give away the Kindle (or Nook), knowing the real money is selling the (way overpriced) digital versions of the books. BTW, remember when hard copies cost way more than the digital copies of books?
Still - $69 is not exactly expensive for the hardware - you would spend that much buying just a decent sized hard drive for a computer.
The reason is that Amazon doesn’t own the books. They have to share the proceeds with the publisher. In fact, Amazon’s strategy is just the opposite. They put the squeeze on publishers to keep the prices of E-books artificially low as an inducement for people buy their devices.
Yeah, but where else could you get get 8-tracks of Bloodrock and Rick Derringer delivered to your doorstep for only $19.95 each?
One thing to keep in mind about subsidizing/giving away these readers is the concern of jailbreaking them. Many, but not all, Kindles have been jailbroken. Nooks have. (I just got one and rooted it right away.)
Then the owner has a cheap Android tablet and can do all sorts of things with them, including not buying books from the supplier.
My Nook Simple Touch is now $79 and can be had for even less here and there. And I will never buy a book from Barnes & Noble. They are losing money on me.
If you give them away, the jailbreaking urge would go wild and the makers would be afraid of taking a bath on them. (Note: I don’t think very many people jailbreak their devices, so this may be paranoia more than anything.)
Yeah I bought mine at $79 some time last year. So it’s had a 12% price drop in the past year.
For the $65.00 Kindle, what can it do jailbroken, that it can’t do normally?
There may be some confusion in your use of the term “original Kindle.” The most basic Kindle model, the one that costs $69 and that Amazon currently refers to simply as the “Kindle,” is not the earliest model they currently offer, let alone the earliest model they’ve ever made.
The Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of showing the various “generations” and models of the Kindle. By the time they started selling the $69 Kindles, I think the technology was mature enough that they were already making and selling that particular variety about as cheaply as they can.
Consumer psychology. You offer to sell something cheap, and people come running, because they think they’re getting a bargain. Offer to give that same thing away for free, and people stay away, because there must be some sort of scam involved.
As others have said, the first Kindle was $400. I wanted one so bad but just couldn’t afford that. Now I look at pictures of the original one and am glad I waited. The design now looks just awful to me. I’m sure just about any design of any electronic item could always be improved, but those original Kindles were just ugly!
Actually not. Amazon has stated they sell the Kindle devices at cost.