Santa's Kindle shoppers hedge on the $A

Beverley Head
Monday, 26 October 2009 08:47

Your IT - Home IT

In less than three weeks the price Australians can expect to pay for a Kindle e-book has dropped from $314 to $280. If the $A achieves parity with the $US it could fall another $21 – leaving local Christmas shoppers literally hedging their bets about when to buy.

When Amazon first announced it would sell the device to Australians it priced the machine at $US279. Today that price fell to $US259, and in the meantime the value of the $A has risen from 88.9 US cents to 92.6 US cents at time of writing, leading to the $34 saving.

The combination of an international Kindle launch in 100 countries and falling prices, along with increased competition from the likes of Sony’s ebook and the just released Barnes & Noble Nook has led to analyst Forrester ramping up its US sales forecast for ebook readers to 3 million this year, with a surge in demand expected in November and December as Christmas looms.

While Forrester believes about 60 per cent of those sales will represent Kindles, Amazon isn’t saying anything. Laura Porco, director of Kindle Books who is in Australia to launch the device, declined to even give a ballpark figure for the number of Kindles that have been bought since launch two years ago.

However she did claim that for books which had a physical and a Kindle format Amazon typically now sold 100 physical copies of the book for every 48 Kindle versions, suggesting a healthy demand for the device. Australians who do purchase the product will have access to 280,000 Kindle titles from Amazon, slightly fewer than the 365,000 titles available to US users thanks to different publishing rights requirements according to Porco.

Weighing in at 289 grammes Kindles use EInk screen technologies, have a long battery life of two to four days (when connected wirelessly to the Amazon network) and two weeks when not connected to the network. They feature an on board 250,000 word dictionary and can carry up to 1500 books (although at this stage in English only – and without any colour illustrations or photographs which somewhat limits their use for many e-text books).

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