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Waiting for the $80 Kindle? Hang On Till 2013

January 18, 2011 at 5:00 am PT

Since Amazon refuses to say how many Kindles it sells, observers keep making educated guesses: Barclays now thinks the e-commerce giant moved 7.1 million e-readers last year. That’s a bit less than the 8 million estimate that Bloomberg reported in December, but no matter what the number is, it’s a lot of Kindles. Barclays think Amazon will keep selling more, despite (and perhaps because of) competition from Apple, while dropping prices of the devices. By 2013, it predicts the average price of the e-reader will drop to $79.

Tagged with Amazon, Apple, Barclays Capital, Bloomberg, competition, drop, e-commerce, E-Reader Feature, entertainment, iPad, Kindle, MediaMemo, newsbyte, Peter Kafka, price, software

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

So if they plan to reduce the price that much in the future, why don’t they do it now? If that’s not yet feasible, how about $99? They would surely sell a whole lot more Kindles at that price, and we authors of e-books would sell more books. – Leonore H. Dvorkin
http://www.facebook.com/people/Foo-Bar/100001341113124 Foo Bar

Does Apple make a device that competes with Amazon Kindle?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CFFCZLYMYV2JEO7FDOVHLPNKKA Scot

The price of the Kindle was cut in half barely eight months ago, and you’re complaining that it’s not lower already? With 7-8 million Kindles sold this year alone, I’d think you’ve already got enough machines out there to market your book to. Or are you actually selling more books than that?
Anonymous

I’m not complaining. I was just wondering why they can’t reduce the price that much very soon if they plan to do it in 2013. What will change for sure between now and then that they will be able to reduce the price then but not now? I merely wanted more technical details. Also, I know lots of people who would welcome that lower price. But my husband and I (the sci-fi and horror author David Dvorkin) are already selling far more copies of our many books in e-book format than we have in print format for quite a few years, now. Hurray for technology! We DO intend to get the cheaper Kindle now. We want no more printed books clogging up our house.
http://bit.ly/samirsshah ???? ???

Wait for iPad2. If it brings down the price of the original iPad to $400, suddenly Amazon may see a reason to go to $99.

To answer your question, a electronics/computing product price is determined by two things 1) parts cost and margin and 2) competition. Sometimes they both have to be very strong for price to go down.