Barney's Blog

Blog archive

Amazon Tablet Sets Fire to Book, Movie and Music Sales

The iPad is certainly, in part, designed to help Apple sell books, movies, music and apps. Fortunately there is a lot you can do with an iPad without shelling out big bucks for books, movies, music and apps. And that more than justifies its $500 base price.

Amazon's approach is the opposite. Its new Android-based Kindle Fire tablet sells for only $200, but barely does a lick unless you load it up with books, movies, and music --which cost money.

I like my books the old fashion way: on a shelf. I can get plenty of movies on basic cable, HBO, or Netflix. Heck, I even drive to the cinema every now and again. And with decades' worth of 8-tracks, LPs, cassettes, CDs and my two iPods, I have music enough to get me through a life sentence.

I don't want to give Amazon $200 for the privilege of giving them more money in the future just so I can use my tablet.

But for Kindle fans, I can see this as a neat upgrade -- these folks already enjoy stashing books on one small device and don't mind paying for the right.

In which camp are you? Let us all know how you feel at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/30/2011 at 1:18 PM


Featured

comments powered by Disqus

Subscribe on YouTube