Jason Del Rey

Recent Posts by Jason Del Rey

Amazon’s Kindle Fire: How Low Will Its Price Go?

Another week, another Kindle Fire sale advertised on Amazon’s homepage.

kindle_fire_hd

Over the last few days, Amazon has lowered the price of its Kindle Fire HD 7-inch tablet to $159, its biggest cut this year to date. This model normally retails at $199.

This follows similar sales timed to holidays over previous months, including Father’s Day and the 4th of July, when the tablet was offered for $169. Amazon also offered a discount on the tablet around Valentine’s Day, according to Decide.com, which tracks product pricing history.

Tablet discounts can be commonplace this time of year, as tablet makers target back-to-school shoppers and unload inventory ahead of new product launches. Amazon, of course, is expected to unveil a new line of Kindles later this year.

But the timing of the Kindle Fire discounts are notable considering the results of IDC’s quarterly tablet report, published earlier this week. In it, Amazon fell out of the top five tablet makers, according to shipments in the second quarter. The research firm told AllThingsD today that Amazon ranked sixth. Last year, Amazon ranked third in the same quarter.

So does Amazon have a Kindle problem on its hands? Seems unlikely, but the company doesn’t help itself by choosing not to reveal sales figures for Kindles.

A spokesperson declined to comment.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald