Something changed with Amazon’s approach to putting Kindles on sale late last year when they only took $20 off the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite for their vaunted Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Since then, Kindles have been going on sale less frequently than they used to, and when they do go on sale the prices aren’t nearly as low as they once were. This includes all versions of the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite, along with the kids versions for each model.
Now Amazon is only taking $15 off the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite for Prime Day, and the Signature Edition version of the Paperwhite is only $10 off. Last year for Prime Day the SE was $65 off, and the base Paperwhite could be had for $90 (this year it’s $135).
The one exception to this is the Kindle Scribe. It goes on sale frequently, and after hitting a new low price of $239 for the 16GB model last fall during a sale, Amazon has beat that price by $5 with this year’s Prime Day sale.
At $235, the Kindle Scribe is by far the least expensive eNote on the market with a 10″ E Ink screen. Most other 10″ eNotes cost around $400, at least. The Kobo Elipsa 2E is currently on sale for $350. Onyx just released the Boox Go 10.3 for $379, and it doesn’t have a frontlight.
So how can Amazon sell the Kindle Scribe for as little as $235? That’s less than they used to sell the Kindle Oasis for with ads and a much smaller 7″ screen. It doesn’t add up.
I think Amazon is selling the Kindle Scribe for such a low price that they have to make up for it by selling other Kindles at a higher price than they used to, and that’s why sales are less frequent now and the prices are much higher than they were before the Kindle Scribe came along.
The Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite are pretty reasonably-priced even at full retail, in part because of the screensaver ads that take $20 off the price, and Amazon is going to sell a lot of them even if they aren’t $40-$65 off a few times a year.
But the days of deeply-discounted Kindles could be a thing of the past, and we have the Kindle Scribe to blame for it.
Why sell the Scribe at such a deep discount relative to the other 10″ e-readers on the market in the first place? Why put themselves in such a hole they need to restrict the sale price of other e-readers? Agree, it doesn’t make much sense.
I think that they are doing it to harvest some juicy data from the users’ handwritten notes.
It looks like monopolistic behavior to me. I think Amazon is trying to put Remarkable out of business, and limit the sales of other competing products like the Kobo Elipsa. Once they dominate the eNote market, they will be free to raise prices.
Yep. Once the competition is minimized then the prices will go up and service will go down. The blueprint of billionaires.
But then why not sell it in all countries?