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| Amazon's bestselling product Kindle is now available in India, along with a massive catalog of books |
| Urvashi Kaul |
| Thursday, October 22, 2009 |
If you are a
total "book-aholic", and like to carry your books along,
where ever you go - or literally sleep, eat, drink, walk, with books
-Amazon's Kindle, is something you should just get your hands on, as
soon as possible. The good news is that Amazon has, this week,
announced its plans to ship Kindle, a digital book reader - one of
its bestselling products, in to the global market, including India.
Now, all one needs to do is to log on to Amazon.com website and
just order "sleek little" Kindle, which has a
six-inch display, right away. Amazon also offers a massive
catalogue - from its bookstore. Amazon promise "to deliver your
favourite books
wirelessly, in less than 60 seconds."
Amongst many
attractive features, Kindle comes with a text-to-speech feature,
which ensures content to be read loudly. The high point of Kindle,
Amazon is boosting about is its battery life, which can last for two
weeks. This international Kindle version allows storing, up to 1500
books. To begin with, the Indian market would have access to 2,
80,000 books through the Amazon's website.
This version of
Kindle will be able to download books over the AT&T network
around the world. Interestingly, even though getting into a global
roaming tie up with AT&T delayed the launch significantly for
Kindle, Amazon chose to avoid getting into dealing separately with
the local service provider's. The AT&T deal, in fact happened
earlier this month.
Amazon's Laura Porco, Director, Kindle
Books says, "What we wanted to make sure was offering a great
customer experience. He does not have to bother about wireless
connections, the fee on it, data roaming, 3G bit, contracts or
anything else." In the US, Kindle users wirelessly download
content over the Sprint Nextel's network. Amazon's India
launch is a part of its global strategy to expand to newer markets,
by starting to ship Kindle
to more than 100 countries. We are not
sure, whether a lot of thinking has gone into specifics of each
country from a longer term perspective, though.
Pricing is
one major issue, which does seem to carry a risk of jeopardising
Kindle sales in India. The product is expected to cost anything over
Rs 20,000 here. It seems for now that Sony's ebook, Samsungs Papyrus
and iRex's iLiad are going to give Kindle some healthy competition.
And one hopes that this e-book 'experience' and revolution catches
on, and the price gets pushed on the downside.
For now,
Amazon is keeping its fingers crossed and hopes to cash in on the
convenience and ease of use for Kindle customers. "For us
simplicity was most important. It is not a gadget; you don't
necessarily have to be a gadget freak. It is a product meant for a
book lover. Once you have ordered, Amazon takes care of everything.
You don't have to hunt for Wi-Fi spots, it just works simple, press
the button, and the book is delivered," says Laura.
While
Amazon hopes the 'simplicity formula' to work well in India as it did
in the US, there is some sort of lack of clarity one demands on the
local hardware support strategy, which it might want to deal with
sooner than later. While, Laura
Porco promises "24 hour
email and phone support," there is not even a remote talk about
having some kind of a local mechanism to deal with issues like
battery change, or a hardware malfunction.
Porco says, "We
are not going to have a local hardware support mechanism to begin
with. We have not done it anywhere else either. Things really depend
of the kind of issue, we can replace the product if need be. As far
as the battery goes, it comes with a one year guarantee."
Amazon currently sells 48 Kindle copies for every 100
physical copies of books that it offers in both formats. A Forrester
report estimates e-reader sales to an estimated three million this
year, with Amazon selling 60% of them and Sony about, 35%. While
these numbers of book sales on Kindle are interesting, it needs to be
seen how India fares when it comes to e-reading on the
Kindle.
A lot also depends on Amazon's strategy to handle the pricing and
hardware hiccups.
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