Amazon To Offer Ad-Supported Kindle

awyeah writes "Amazon will soon be offering a discounted, ad-supported Wi-Fi Kindle called 'Kindle with Special Offers.' The price will be $114, a $25 discount from the $139 wifi-only device. Note that the advertisements will not appear during reading, only on the screen saver and home page. Will that be enough of a discount to get readers to purchase an ad-supported device?"

Comments

not enough of a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

An ad supported kindle should be free, or at least under $40. I would gladly pay the extra $25 to not see ads. In fact, I have.

Re:not enough of a discount

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah I wouldn't mind buying the device with ads for 2 years, where if I stop connecting to Amazon they start charging me monthly or something, to pay it off. Device sold by 2 years of served ads, and lucre on purchased ebooks. The trick would be getting a free one and never touching it, which is costly to Amazon; so of course if I'm not connecting to Amazon to get their ads, I should be billed.

Re:not enough of a discount

[metrometro]

> Its more like Kindle with coupons!

KroupOn!

Re:not enough of a discount

[e3m4n]

They totally missed their opportunity here.. ad support is a good start but they should have worked with periodicals to create a subsidy for a steeper discount. Perhaps they could create a $40 version that required you to subscribe to the NYTimes publication for a period of 12 months that also had the ads on there. The NYT completely saves on printing cost, they expand their reading base, and amazon.com gets more devices out there. Its the cell phone concept that has proven to work very well.

Re:not enough of a discount

[drinkypoo]

If the ads are not absurdly obnoxious then how many would really do it?

It took me some time to figure out what you meant. Try complete sentences. Anyway, offering a substantially discounted Kindle would only create a market for unlocked Kindles with alternative software. Amazon most especially does not want to do this.

Re:not enough of a discount

[rainmouse]

yeah $25 off is clearly not enough, it needs to be no more than half the price to make it worth actually considering the ad supported version

I disagree. There are plenty people who buy a kindle that would happily accept a small discount in exchange for some shitty screen-savers. Personally I would get one just for the challenge of killing the ads and turning it into a regular kindle.

Re:not enough of a discount

[tophermeyer]

Prescription, do you own/have you used a Kindle?

The way these ads are delivered is just about the least intrusive advertising vector I can think of. The ads will be displayed on the hibernation screen that appears when the Kindle is off. On current Kindles what is displayed is a rotating selection of portraits of authors or literary illustrations. Replacing those images with ads will literally cost the user absolutely nothing in terms of cost, time, or attention.

Quite the opposite, because Amazon's recommendation system is so robust, as a current Kindle owner I would be interested in getting this on my current Kindle. Amazon does a great job of offering recommendations for e-book purchases based on what I've read in the past. We're supposed to be living in the future, it would be nice if my e-book reader is smart enough to make intelligent recommendations on what I might like to read next.

Re:not enough of a discount

[Gramie2]

Just because advertising is currently unobtrusive doesn't mean that it always will be. When some manager realizes that his bonus is being threatened, it's amazing how obtrusive they are willing to get.

Of course, you could say that if it changes you would switch, and after a couple of years you might be looking for a new e-book reader anyway. Still, if Amazon is successful with an ad-supported Kindle you know that other manufacturers will follow suit and there will be few alternatives.

Remember when cable TV had no ads? I do.

Re:not enough of a discount

[rbollinger]

Amazon Link

The ads are actually pretty unobtrusive. You can see them at the link above, about half way down the page.
They do have the ads on the hibernation screen (which are most likely 'un-clickable'), as well as ads on your homepage (which are probably clickable). I agree that $25 does seem a bit slim for the discount, but still worth it, after all how long will it be until a few clever people will probably figure out how to re-write the memory so that you have the full version.

Re:not enough of a discount

[luis_a_espinal]

What you say is true, but it doesn't matter.

It's not a matter of how much it costs the user, it's how much revenue it generates for Amazon. I would guess that they're going to make an additional $200 per user per ad-driven Kindle, so giving me a $25 discount is NOT enough!

They don't buy one, and simply pay the extra for the no-advertisements variety. I for one don't give a shit if Amazon makes $1 or $200 per user-ad. I still get my $25 discount, and, considering Amazon's history, I will also get non-obtrusive advertisements on things I'm interested in. My satisfaction is not tied to their profit margin, nor I will wish them not to increase their profit simply because I'm not getting a share of that pie (something I'm not entitled to since I'm neither involved nor invest in their product development.)

Buyers Remorse

[geekmux]

"...Will that be enough of a discount to get readers to purchase an ad-supported device?"

Probably, but chances are most users, no matter how unobtrusive the ads may be, will likely regret not forking over the "extra" $25 to try and have at least ONE electronic experience that is ad-free, as one can hardly get away from advertising these days, no matter where you are.

Re:Buyers Remorse

[just_another_sean]

Ads. Coming soon to your dreams!

Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

Damn near prescient I would say!

Limited Time

[Gutboy]

For $25 do I only get ads for a week or two? Or for the rest of the devices lifetime? It's not worth the discount if the latter.

Re:Limited Time

[somersault]

No, he means the latter. I'd take the $25 discount if it was only 2 weeks of ads.

Seriously though, if the ads aren't there while reading the book, I don't see the big deal even if it's for the lifetime of the device. The only time I look at my Kindle is when I'm actually reading a book. Now, I don't want ads myself, but I know some people who would take that kind of discount. Some people even seem to like ads..

only $25 off on a long-lived device?

[turtledawn]

Nope. Not nearly enough.

Re:only $25 off on a long-lived device?

[somersault]

There is a "screensaver", though of course it doesn't really act as a screensaver, it's more of a notification that the device is now on standby.

Re:only $25 off on a long-lived device?

[turtledawn]

I do actually have one - it was an unwanted gift from my mother in law. She's very nice. The only use I've had for it is using it to demo the accessibility features for a radio show I do for vision impaired people. I rather like the author portraits it displays in standby mode and would be sad to lose those to ads, esp. if only for a $25 discount.

Inevitable End Result

[Sonny Yatsen]

I think the inevitable end result of ad-supported e-Books is subtle (or not so subtle) product placements inserted into books. I can't wait until "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" becomes a product placement for Timex, and Tom Sawyer takes a refreshing sip of Coca-cola as he rafts down the Mississippi.

An important detail

[Drakkenmensch]

Will the device refuse to run if it's not able to connect to the ad server?

$25 for reduced battery life?!?

[RingDev]

Sign me up!

-Rick

Re:$25 for reduced battery life?!?

[metrometro]

Other than pinging the radio once in a while (which it could do while charging, if you wanted to be nice about it), putting ads on the e-ink screens do not draw extra power. The Kindle already flashes the screen once to show a "screen saver" image.

Coffee Table Real Estate

[metrometro]

At a hardware level, the e-ink screen is begging for this kind of treatment. When powered off, it's basically a coffee-table billboard waiting to happen, married to all the radios and spyware you need to profile the house its sitting in and deliver the ads.

I'm totally grossed out by this. For now it's opt in, but it won't be in the future. Expect this to show up on all kinds of crap as e-ink screen prices drop. Lunch boxes, refrigerators, etc.

Just another reason the $75 Kobo is the best e-reader on the market (I've owned a Nook, Kindle and Kobo).

Re:Coffee Table Real Estate

[Lehk228]

it's too bad RCA doesn't get back into the eReader business

i had an REB 1100 which included a resistive touch screen indiglo backlit LCD and integrated modem to dial in and buy books.

it still had the best UI i have seen for an e reader

the the page foreward and back buttons were large flipper-ish buttons on the side that could be hit with a palm squeeze, and one of the functions was a direction button where any of the 4 sides could be designated as the top, since it was not physically symmetrical this was very useful, you could turn it landscape with the fat part as top and place the book on a table or desk, with the thin side as top when holding landscapr, or either end as top depending if you were holding it left or right handed (iirc flipping which was top also switched which of the page flippers was forward and back, but i'm not sure on that one)

Re:Coffee Table Real Estate

[turtledawn]

Kindle offers orientation changing (though not automatically like the iPad and not with a single button press). The page buttons aren't as nice as what you're describing, though.

Oh, the horror...

[Diddlbiker]

...of having an ad on the cover of a device when it is turned off. Thank god your tablet, smartphone or laptop does not have a big logo on the cover, advertising its manufacturer.

I wouldn't mind getting a $25 discount for that. The two problems that I have with it are:
* Are the ads related to what I bought on Amazon? If I buy, say, a dozen dildos, do I have advertisments for sex toys on the cover of my kindle for the next two weeks (or until I buy something else)
* Is Amazon going to pull a bezos on me? After two months reverting and saying "you know what, we are going to insert advertisements inside your e-book on second thought. You know, a bit like "an e-book on the kindle is just like a real book. Except that we can yank it from your shelf if we decide that's a good idea".

Re:Not even close

[HelioWalton]

(you can't read an eBook from any vendor other than Amazon on a Kindle),

And where exactly did you come up with this? The main problem is that it can't read ePubs, but you can load anything in a format it supports (txt, mobi, html, pdf if you are masochistic, etc....) via USB, and with some (txt, mobi I think are the only two), you can even download them using the experimental web browser from any store or website.

Re:Kindle Owner Speaking

[Nimey]

If you'd RTFA, it's not supposed to interrupt your reading. It'll show ads when the screensaver kicks in, and on the home screen.

I'd still not buy one of these - $25 isn't enough of a discount, even with the other stuff, and I've got a 3G K3 already - but it's not quite so bad as you'd like to pretend it is.

Still people will complain

[pvera]

When the original Kindle came out, people complained it was horribly expensive. Whenever Amazon released a new model and/or chopped the MSRP, people complained it was horribly expensive. When it went under $200 people bitched that there was no reason for it to sell for more than $150. When the Wifi model came out for $139 people complained that there was no reason for it to cost more than $100. Now the Wifi can be purchased for $114 and people are going to come up with any excuse to complain about the price, ads or both.

I am 100% convinced that even if Amazon gives it away just for the cost of shipping (free if you are on Prime), people will still bitch and moan about the stupid ads.

I have owned two Kindles (awesome, cludgy), two Kindle 2s (awesome, period) and currently two Kindle 3 Wifi (awesome, keyboard sucks). All of our previous Kindle devices were sold to friends for a reasonable price, and all of them are (that I know) still up and running today, and each and everyone loves them.

Both my wife and myself adore this device, for people like us that read a book or more per week these devices are extremely practical. The Wifi model uses so little power that it freaks me out whenever I realize that I actually need to charge it.