Will Amazon’s $200 tablet spark interest among schools?
With its new Kindle Fire, Amazon’s digital ambitions burn; some analysts say its new tablet could offer the strongest challenge yet to Apple’s iPad
The Kindle Fire only has 8 MB of storage space, but Amazon is offering users free web-based storage for any digital content they buy from the company.
Amazon’s unveiling of the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer that costs a few hundred dollars less than Apple’s iPad, sends a bright-hot message: The online retailer is ready to rival Apple in an effort to be the world’s top provider of digital content.
It might sound odd coming from a company that pioneered online sales of physical books in 1995. But since it first entered the digital market in 2006 with its video download store, Amazon has bet consumers will pay for high-quality digital content.
Besides the millions of physical items it sells, Amazon’s trove of digital content now includes more than 1 million eBooks, 100,000 movies and TV shows, and 17 million songs. This is about 1 million fewer songs than iPad maker Apple Inc. sells, but more than twice as many eBooks and many thousands more TV shows and movies.
Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos is confident that its content is what will help the Kindle Fire do better than others who have trotted out tablets.
“The reason they haven’t been successful is because they made tablets. They didn’t make services,” Bezos said in an interview after his company unveiled the tablet at a New York media event Sept. 28.
The price will probably help, too: When it goes on sale Nov. 15, it will cost $199, which is less than half of the $499 you’ll pay for Apple’s cheapest iPad and $50 less than book seller Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook Color eReader. This leaves buyers with plenty of money left over to spend on content.
“It’s important to remember at the end of the day that Amazon’s core business is retailing, and this is a way to sell more digital media on a sort of 7-inch vending machine,” NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin said.
2 Responses to Will Amazon’s $200 tablet spark interest among schools?
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wtakacs2
October 3, 2011 at 6:50 pm
They still need to get the book publishers on board if school districts are going to buy these devices.
Parents will welcome the lighter backpacks too.
bob.longo
October 3, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Some of us have seen the price war strategy fail in education and in consumer markets before. Going back to the 80′s I remember watching the TI 99 go from over $1,000 to the same price as their model number ($99). Actually, during the final fire sale I knew schools who bought them for $49. So we know that price alone is not the answer. It is more about both actual and perceived value. We also know that this is about the business model and momentum. Apple has demonstrated this with the Music Store and the App Store in combination with a tantalizing device. The one new variable that may flip things more quickly in K-12 is the transition from printed texts to digital textbooks. This has to do with school economics at a time when education leaders and boards are scrambling to discover dramatic ways to deliver more with less. Print publishers are very quickly finding themselves in educational quick sand. Now we will find out who was genuinely smart and strategic and who was primarily using technology as marketing sizzle to facilitate the sale of more hardback books and disposable collateral material. The tremors are already sending indicators that the Big One is on the way. And unlike California, “Textbook Armageddon” is probably not years away but months.