With the holiday shopping season just around the corner, competition in the e-reader space is heating up. Recently iRex and Sony announced that they will launch new e-reader devices in the U.S. and now Amazon says it will reduce the price of the Kindle and launch a global version of the device.
According to an article from The New York Times, the new Kindle will use AT&T’s wireless network and its global partners to allow customers in the U.S. and 100 other countries to download books wirelessly to the device. Customers using the global device will be able to choose books from a catalog of about 200,000 compared to the 350,000 available in the U.S. Kindle store and the catalogs will be tailored to the specific countries.
Chief Executive, Jeff Bezos commented, “We regularly ship millions of English-language books to non-English speaking countries and people have to wait for the delivery. Now they can get books in 60 seconds. That is a pretty exciting part of what we are announcing.”
Jeff Bezos also provided some information about Kindle vs. print sales. Bezos said that when Amazon offers a Kindle and print version of a book, it sells 48 Kindle copies for every 100 print copies. In May, Amazon sold 35 Kindle copies for every 100 print copies. Bezos referred to this increase as “astonishing.”
