Suddenly, there were a load of earthquakes in the eBook device world today:
To cap off Sony dropping the Pocket Edition to $169 and the Touch Edition to $199, in comes Barnes & Noble with a new WiFi Nook for $149 and the original 3G Nook reduced to $199 — and then Amazon spits on all of them by dropping the Kindle to $189!
Suddenly, Sony has no place left to go in eBooks. Will Sony still be around in that business by the end of this year? I doubt it! Add that as another FAIL in the strutting Howard Stringer’s Reign of FAIL.
And then there’s this, my first tweet of the day:
— which gets confirmation:
See: Don’t Mean To Be Alarmist, But The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft’s Business Will Just Completely Collapse.
With eInk devices scrambling for any little bit of market share in a field absolutely dominated by the iPad, what should Apple’s next move be?
An iPad mini with a 6″-screen for $299 by Christmas. That would address the size issue, most of the weight issue, and by coming it at the price point of what eInk devices used to be, show them to be the transient duct-tape-triage technology they always were.
And with all that being said, all of the Big Six print publishers better start preparing for a world in which no electronic/digital book has a price higher than $4.99 for fiction and $9.99 for non-fiction.
With that price further collapsing a year later — as books move from being things as files to destinations on the Internet.