LinkNotes: Amazon's Kindle: the iPod of E-Book Readers (video)

2007-11-20

Amazon's Kindle: the iPod of E-Book Readers (video)

IPod of E-Book Readers?
Amazon Taps Apple Strategy

Six years ago, Apple Inc. began remaking the digital music market with a portable gadget that could hold an entire music collection, downloaded inexpensively from the Web.

Now Amazon.com Inc., the online retail giant, has come up with what it hopes will be the iPod of e-book readers, the Kindle, which can download books, newspapers and Web content wirelessly, and includes a keyboard for annotating books as well.

Besides ease of downloading, Mr. Bezos believes Amazon can win over consumers with attractive pricing for content. It is initially offering more than 90,000 electronic versions of books for Kindle, with best-sellers and new releases priced at $9.99 and classics as low as $1.99. Newspapers such as the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and magazines such as Fortune will be available at monthly subscription fees.