For years, the conventional wisdom about Amazon's Kindle e-reader was that the company, which likes to say that it wants to make money when customers use its products, would eventually make buying ebooks irresistible by offering a Kindle e-reader for free. But Amazon has refused to play along. For the time being, the cheapest Kindle is $80, which is actually 10 bucks more than the least expensive model of a few years ago. My hunch is that Amazon isn't under much pressure to slash Kindle prices to nothing—or at least next to nothing—because most of us already own free Kindle e-readers, in the form of smartphones that can run the company's Kindle app. That's left the company free to pursue a strategy that I sure didn't see coming: It's been releasing ever-more refined, high-end Kindle e-readers, aimed at people who love the idea of a device that's optimized for reading, and only reading. This trend became clear in 2014, when Amazon released the $200 Kindle Voyage. With its sleek industrial design and ultra-readable E Ink display, it supplanted the Kindle Paperwhite as the the top-of-the-line Kindle. And now the company is introducing the Kindle Oasis, teased by Jeff Bezos last week and then leaked in more or less its entirety. The $290 model, which starts shipping on April 27, does to the Voyage what the Voyage did to the Paperwhite. But it accomplishes that with some new twists which, if it weren't for the leak, would be wholly unexpected. Thinner And Thicker In... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'
[ Fast Company | 2016-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]