Amazon are branching out into High Street retailers for sales of their Kindle book reader. This is an interesting development as Amazon are traditionally an online retailer and marketplace. It appears that the phenomenal success of the Kindle with eBooks outselling paperbacks and hardbacks on Amazon has given them a thirst for a bigger share of the market.
You can buy a Kindle (at the same price as from Amazon) in Curry’s, Dixons, John Lewis and PC World. However these retailers are only offering the device in their retail outlets, they won’t be supplying them online.
This should generate increased sales for Amazon as the Kindle is available to customers who may never have made a purchase on Amazon in the past, but as the Kindle is tied to Amazon’s inventory of ebooks every subscription and ebook purchase will add to Amazon’s sales.
As the Kindle is priced the same in retail outlets as direct from Amazon they must be losing margin on the sale of the hardware, but this will probably be more than made up for in the longer term with newly acquired customers and eBook sales as well as in the brand awareness.
9 Responses
This is interesting, Asda and Tesco sell the top selling book releases and Asda do two for £7 (or something like that) and this has affected traditional book sellers. I think Sussex Books has gone bust and the whole lot are suffering as a result of the supermarkets getting into the book market. I can see Amazon making in roads with this. But if we are really heading for an energy crises in the next decade with electricity being prioritised away from business use to domestice use, as perdicted by goverment think tanks for the last ten years. Won’t this end up being an exspensive way to read a book? I can’t see the end of the paper book just yet because our goverments never govern, they sweep everything under the carpet and make problems for the next generation.
I guess another consideration for Amazon to bear in mind here is that the Kindle isn’t the only book reader device in town (I’m very happy with my Sony reader), Amazon probably wants the Kindle to be available on the High Street alongside them.
I think Kindle is great by far the best e book reader.
Though some one needs to make an affordable light to go with it as all the ones i tried are useless
I have the kindle app on my Android but I tend to use Audible for audio books more often than the Kindle, if I read for too long from a book or reader it makes me fall asleep, besides there’s nothing like having the author read their story to you 🙂
I’ve just come across another factor to bear in mind when choosing a device – my local county library has just started an ebook lending service, but you can’t use a Kindle with it because (to quote the library): “the Amazon device is a proprietary format and as such does not allow library loaned material which adheres to an open standard.”