On November 19, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos announced the launch of an e-book device called Kindle. It weighs 10.3 ounces, costs $399 and can download books in less than 60 seconds. He acknowledged upfront that the e-book landscape is crowded with other efforts, most of them unsuccessful, but Bezos thinks that he has a winner. Kindle lets users download many new books for $9.99 and it can be used without a computer -- offering instead a free high-speed wireless data network from Sprint. It can also download newspapers, magazines and blogs for a fee, can store up to 200 books, uses an eye friendly screen and lets readers increase the type size as needed. So, what's not to like?
We asked marketing professor Peter Fader, Don Huesman, senior director of information technology and management professor Dan Raff to give us their reviews of Kindle. In the interest of full disclosure, we would like to note that Knowledge@Wharton's content is available on Kindle.
An edited version of the transcript follows:
Knowledge@Wharton: So, Pete, Dan and Don: Will Kindle be a best seller or is it doomed to flop, like most other e-book efforts before it?
Fader: Well, how about something in between? I think that this is a great move for Amazon per se. Maybe they won't sell out of these things, but the fact that we're having this conversation; the fact that they are getting some buzz about it, the fact that they've found a way to integrate this hardware technology with what they do -- selling books -- and reminding people that they are a big online book store -- and can add value to readers in ways that other book stores can't - I think that's all terrific.
How much money will they make off of it - off of this device, per se? Not much. But, maybe the subscription service... there are other ways of making people more engaged with the things that they sell -- I think that it can be successful.
Raff: It has striking elements of continuity with Amazon's initial operation strategy.
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