Amazon’s goal is to have a Kindle in every pair of hands in America. That’s Apple’s goal with the iPad too, but the difference is, Apple wants to do it while remaining profitable on the hardware. Amazon’s willing to give that up if it means they can make boatloads of cash on the ebooks.
That’s why Amazon releases free Kindle software for every platform capable of running text on a screen, and that’s why — if you plot the Kindle’s price decline over the past couple of years — you can see that it is on track to eventually be free in November of this year, at least to Amazon Prime customers.
For the rest of the consumers out there, though? Amazon’s now working on a new plan: ad-supported Kindles. And while users don’t get much of a discount off of the regular Kindle now (just $25 off the $139 entry-level Kindle price to have your e-reader “sponsored” with advertisements on the homescreen and in the screensavers), I expect that the savings will drop to free soon enough.
Amazon’s plan has never really been to build the best e-reader, although the Kindle’s an excellent device. Their plan has been to make a good enough e-reader cheaply enough that they can just give one away to anyone who wants one.
