I noticed a couple of new listings at Amazon the other day for Kindles that come bundled with a membership for Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s ebook subscription service that costs $9.99 per month.
I made the suggestion a long time ago that Amazon should include Kindle Unlimited on new Kindles because I think it’s a pretty cool idea to be able to get a new Kindle that has immediate access to a library of over 1 million ebooks.
However, the prices don’t appear to be any less than buying the two separately so that’s kind of strange.
I thought maybe Amazon had added the option to add a Kindle Unlimited subscription to the Kindle purchase process but so far that’s not the case.
These new landing pages seem to be for something else since they contain no information whatsoever, and Amazon isn’t promoting them anywhere yet. It seems like they are planning something with this.
Right now they only have the Paperwhite and entry-level Kindle available with Kindle Unlimited. The Paperwhite comes with twelve months of Kindle Unlimited and the regular Kindle comes with 6 months.
I wish they would do a tier system. If i were to get Kindle Unlimited….I’d really only be interested in reading…..and $10/mo for that selection is a bit much.
I’m shocked that there’s not a decreased price for the “bundle”…that’s bad marketing.
Kindle Paperwhite with Kindle Unlimited (12 month membership)
Price: $239.87
Note: Not eligible for Amazon Prime.
that last part is kinda strange… not eligible for Amazon Prime
My guess is that the problem is with margins for each. The device probably doesn’t have more than $10-20 profit and there are a lot of restless authors in KU that Amazon has to keep happy with increasing dollars. That can’t happen with a discounted KU. Plus, KU *probably* takes away some of the retail revenue they get as well, so they don’t want to make KU look *too* attractive.
Bottom-line is that each of these — device and KU — are about as cheap as they can go. Short of raising margins on new devices (like the 32gb PW3) in the future, they’re stuck. It’s not “bad marketing”, it’s a bleeding-edge margin.
That they’re playing around with this bundle and making the old seem new again (arguably) implies they’ve got nothing new to introduce (save for that higher capacity PW3). That’s a shame because it further implies the plan is to milk ereaders rather than developing new devices.
Kobo better hurry up and buy B&N or, at least, US distribution rights to a Nook/Kobo reader.