Amazon Kindle: Any space for the news?

Posted by Dawn Osakue on July 29, 2010 at 11:38 AM

Amazon's 3rd generation Kindle will be shipped to buyers starting August 27. Smaller, lighter and faster, the Kindle has been designed to reduce chances of digital intrusions on the reading experience.

With storage capacity for 3,500 Books, a month of battery life, free 3G wireless, built-in Wi-Fi support, Text-to-Speech, and an "integrated, retractable reading light that lets you read comfortably anytime, anywhere," the new Kindle is good news, and for $189 or $139 without 3G, it comes cheaper than many of its peers.

What does this mean for news industry? The new Kindle seems similar in functionality to the previous versions, and still operates using E Ink. According to Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, "takes pains to distinguish the Kindle from the iPad, saying the company is committed to making a single-purpose piece of consumer electronics...intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare."

Fowler continues with the observation that "newspaper and magazine publishers have shifted their efforts away from the Kindle and towards tablets such as the iPad that offer color and interactive capabilities." This remark probably has as its origin the recent flooding of the market with iPad apps released by media houses. In a grim forecast, he concludes by saying, "the new Kindle device still won't be able to show such content, and could leave its market position vulnerable to devices that do."

When viewed from another angle however, the Kindle still holds a price advantage. While the new version without Wi-Fi is $139, Tricia Duryee of paidContent.org notices that "the lowest end iPad and iPod Touch cost $500 and $200, respectively." This means more people would have access to the new devices.

Can popularity and price advantage be more useful to news dissemination than an interactive, colourful experience?

Source: The Wall Street Journal, paidContent.org, Amazon.com News Release