What does it cost to make a Kindle?

[thewayne]

About 52% of the price that Amazon charges, with over 40% of that being the display.

I have no problem with Amazon making a decent profit on it, they have R&D costs to recover and to pay for developing the Kindle 3, etc. What I do have a problem with is the amount of money they are paying to Sprint to subsidize the cellular connection that it requires. I would be perfectly happy with a unit that required a WiFi or BlueTooth or USB connection (or memory card, for that matter) to transfer books to it if they would bring the price down to under $200. Unless I become a road warrior, there is no way I'd pay $360 for one of these puppies, regardless of how cool it is.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090421_430707.htm

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1935202&art_pos=17

Comments

[silveradept]

Thos restrictions are one of the reasons why I'm not interested in the Kindle. What I want in a reader is something that I can use on my terms, with my designs, if need be, with my data plan/network, and the Kindle doesn't do that at all. It would be better for me to buy something else and download/utilize a free reading program that will open the format of my choice.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

And that's why I'm using a Dell Axim that cost me $120 on eBay. All of my books are free from either the Baen Public Library or Project Gutenberg.

[silveradept]

I'm thinking my Nokia N810 that I bought to be my external memory core on work schedules and issues and such will be flexible enough to the task, and then, yay for the Project and the Baen Free/Public Library.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For me, I've used Palm Pilots for many years, probably over 15. I like PDAs and have used them for external memory (much to the ridicule of my wife) and refuse to without them. They're my Dayplanner in my pocket. I was reluctant to switch to a Dell, but Palm (IMHO) abandoned their supporters so there's not much choice.

Oh, speaking of Gutenberg: I don't know if you've noticed it, but they have a classic science fiction section on their site including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Wells, MZ Bradley, etc. I'm intending on posting it to my web site in the near future.

[silveradept]

I've got a Handspring Visor Pro that I inherited right now, but the Graffiti is going out on it and the tapping of styluses isn't keeping up like it used to. I think it may be on its way out. Thus, new tool to keep up with me.

I did not know Dell made PDAs - the reviews that I read all favored Palm and HP products. It's too late to retract the decision now, but do you think it would have been a possibly inexpensive way of keeping things going?

Did not know about the SF archive on Gutenberg - may download some amount of it on to the new device, just so that I have something like "The Last Question" readily at hand if I make a reference to the last line in it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, broadly-speaking, there's three families of PDAs: Palm, Windows Family (WinCE, Windows Mobile, and I think there's another family), and everyone else (I think Symbian is one of these). The Windows family includes HP/Compaq/iPaq, the Dell series, and anyone else I can't think of. Palm included Handspring, Sony, and IBM. Handspring was formed by former Palm execs (Palm started as a 3Com company) which they later sold back to Palm.

The list of makers of Windows family devices is pretty impressive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_Mobile_devices. But they're largely identical in features since they're all running the same OS. In terms of reliability, no idea. My Dell Axim has been pretty solid, though it does require a reboot mostly weekly (no surprise there).

As far as being inexpensive, the $130ish that I paid for the Axim is a little more than an identical Palm Zire Z22 which is slowly failing on me and considerably less than the Tungsten which has lots of really horrible reviews on Amazon. So I decided to jump ship and see if other PDAs were reasonable quality. So far, so good, except for some inexplicable reason I don't seem to be able to find software to sync my Windows Mobile device with my Macintosh. :-)

[silveradept]

Ah, that explains why I didn't consider it - I did not want to go with Windows Mobile anything, smartphone or otherwise, and so I restricted my options pretty hard by doing so - the Palm that was recommended was more expensive than the Nokia device, and I think I can do more with the Nokia that I would be able to with the Palm, so that's what I went with. Here's hoping that it turns out to have been a smart decision.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For me, I didn't want a phone for a PDA, so going with a Smartphone wasn't practical. Though considering the size of my Dell, the Smartphone might not be significantly larger.

[silveradept]

Yeah. Smartphone was not what I wanted, especially because it required the data plan to be useful. I'm not paying for a data plan to use a phone as a mostly-offline external memory module.