On Wednesday, Amazon Will Unveil The “Kindle Fire”
Last Friday, Amazon sent out invites to a press conference being held this coming Wednesday. They didn't give away any details in the invite, but given our scoop earlier this month, everyone assumed it was to unveil the new Kindle tablet.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's Wednesday press event closes a loop that started with the original Kindle's 2007 debut: the company that proved e-readers could sell books now appears ready to put its storefront on a full color tablet. The invite itself was silent, but TechCrunch's earlier scoop set expectations, and the syndicated pickup shows how wide the story has travelled — AllThingsD reports most big magazine publishers have signed on for the device, while gdgt notes the hardware looks like a PlayBook 'because it basically is.'
The timing matters because Amazon arrives with fresh scars from platform politics: last month it shipped the Kindle Cloud Reader as a workaround after Apple's iOS terms changes threatened the Kindle app, and Microsoft dropped its own Reader app in August, conceding the e-book market to Amazon and Apple.
First-order effects
- Magazine publishers signing on give Amazon a periodical catalog at launch, making the Fire a content bundle rather than a bare tablet and giving publishers a second distribution channel alongside Apple's Newsstand terms.
- Apple now faces a tablet competitor whose economics don't depend on hardware margin — Amazon can price the device against its book, magazine, and media sales instead.
Second-order effects
- If gdgt's read is right that the Fire shares PlayBook hardware roots, RIM loses differentiation on its own design while its supplier gains volume from a far larger customer.
- Publishers who signed with Amazon gain leverage in their ongoing terms negotiations with Apple, whose iOS rules already forced Amazon onto the web-based Cloud Reader path.
Third-order effects
- The rumored 10.1-inch model reportedly entering mass production in Q1 2012 suggests Amazon is testing whether the content-subsidized playbook scales beyond the 7-inch form factor, though that remains unconfirmed.
- If the Fire sells on content rather than specs, tablet competition shifts from hardware benchmarks to storefront breadth — pressuring every Android vendor still pricing tablets like PCs.
The trend: Consumer hardware is becoming a delivery mechanism for media subscriptions, with Amazon extending the Kindle's sell-content-not-devices model into tablets.