Need a last-minute gift? Go get yourself an eBook reader
It's the week before Christmas. You were hoping to find a gift that would be so thoughtful and such an emotionally-compelling statement about your relationship that your loved one would never intellectually work out just how little you spent on it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after The New York Times wondered whether an e-book reader 'just may catch on', a Chicago Sun-Times columnist is recommending one as the default last-minute Christmas present — the clearest sign yet that the category has crossed from gadget-review pages into general-interest gift guides.
Amazon set up this moment deliberately: Jeff Bezos gave a rare interview to the Times just under two weeks ago (answering questions on books, pricing and the Kindle's direction), and in September Bits was already probing whether Amazon would open the Kindle to outside developers. A device being pitched as an emotionally compelling but cheap-feeling gift is a device that has stopped needing to justify its own existence.
First-order effects
- Amazon heads into the final pre-Christmas week with its Kindle positioned as a mass-market gift rather than an early-adopter purchase, putting pressure on retail stock and shipping capacity in the last buying window of 2009.
- Anyone still shopping faces e-reader pricing as the column's explicit hook — a high-perceived-thoughtfulness gift at low actual spend — which frames the whole category around affordability.
Second-order effects
- Every device sold in this gift rush pulls buyers into Amazon's bookstore rather than any competitor's, so rival device makers are pushed to match the Kindle on price and content breadth during the same holiday window.
- If Amazon does open the Kindle platform to developers, as Bits asked in September, each gifted device becomes a distribution point for third-party software as well as books — widening the gap between ecosystem owners and single-purpose readers.
Third-order effects
- Gift-driven adoption converts e-readers from a niche electronics segment into a recurring channel through which publishers' holiday sales migrate from paper to licensed digital copies, shifting where seasonal revenue lands.
- The pattern points toward device makers competing on storefronts and developer platforms instead of hardware specs, with whoever owns the account relationship capturing the post-holiday spending.
The trend: E-book readers are completing their move from reviewed curiosities to default holiday gifts, making the 2009 season the moment the market shifts from selling devices to locking in bookstore and app ecosystems.