E-Book Reader Price Reductions Follow The Launch Of The IPad

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 launched in February of 2009 and the larger Kindle DX model 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. Sony’s PRS reader, which was released in 2006 in advance of the Kindle reader, was in second place with a smaller, but still respectable, 35% share. 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 Plastic Logic, Sony, Barnes and Noble, Bookeen and iRex fought to secure their share of the new and fast developing e-book market, but the Kindle’s dominant market position seemed to be impregnable. 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 release of the iPad, e-book reader prices have fallen 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. The Nook reader, from Barnes and Noble, also fell in price to $ 199 from $ 259.

Whilst the iPad may have provoked a round of price reductions among e-book reader manufacturers, the same cannot be said about the price of the e-books for use with the readers. In advance of the iPad’s launch, Apple had struck a deal with the big publishing houses which allowed them to fix the price of their e-book editions at whatever level they liked – on the condition that the same e-book would not be offered at a lower price for any other reader. This was seen as good news by the publishers, who had been unhappy with Amazon’s policy of selling all e-books for $ 9.99 or less.

Amazon may have had to abandon their e-book price policy – but it’s hardly a disaster for them, or for 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 hard to see an alternative explanation for the fact that they have made Kindle books available on so many different devices. At the moment, 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 Amazon, Barnes and Noble and now Apple, who have a stake in the future sale of e-books over the life of a reader, can take the opportunity to sell the hardware for less and still make their profit over the lifetime 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.

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