Amazon Kindle not looking like a hit

Posted Nov 20th 2007 1:12PM by Zac Bissonnette
Filed under: Amazon.com (AMZN), Books, Technology

Today marks the launch of Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading device.

I just watched a video demonstration of the machine here, and it looks pretty cool. But I'm not going to order one because, at $399 plus the cost of books, it just doesn't seem like a bargain.

And Amazon shoppers aren't too impressed. The 300+ people who have reviewed the gadget so far are giving it just 2.5 out of 5 stars on average, the same number of stars that Gigli, Ben and Jennifer's colossal flop is scoring on the site.

Given that the product is so new, it's up for debate how many of the reviewers have even tried the device. Most of the reviews seem to cite the high price as a major turn-off.

It's too early to call this a handheld Edsel, but you have to wonder whether people will rush to buy it with the reviews looking so poor.

Tags: Amazon, AMZN, inthenews, Kindle

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

11-20-2007 @ 7:54PM

John Leonard said...

They don't get it do they? No one wants to buy an expensive e-book reader and then be locked in to only reading the texts that they sell you in a proprietary format.
Hey electronics manfacturers, if you want to make $$$$ make a good e-book reader that you can use to read your own .docs, .txts, .htmls, .pdfs that you've downloaded free, or from other retailers online. DON'T try to lock the reader into your range of books (which will never be large enough to satisfy enough purchasers).

11-26-2007 @ 12:44PM

Gumby said...

Bezos figured he will sell well to those kind of people who usually remarks things like "Oh, its sooo wonderful!!" or " Can you help me, I cant understand how this works?". My god! Those marketing people can sell anything! I am almost floored that they are still selling mymailstation widgets that does nothing but emails for $9.95 a month. My gosh!