Review: The 2011 $79 Kindle with ads and buttons
New $79 Kindle with ads (left), Kindle 3 (right), asleep — Nearly everything about the $79 Kindle is cheap. — The lock screen shows a giant ad whenever the Kindle is off. Previous Kindles show tasteful pictures of classic authors when they're off.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon has been walking the ad-subsidized price ladder all year: in April it put special offers on the Kindle for $114, and this week the trade-off reaches the bottom of the line with a $79 model whose sleep screen shows an advertisement instead of the classic-author artwork previous Kindles displayed.
Marco.org's review judges nearly everything about the device cheap next to the Kindle 3, which remains the build-quality benchmark in the lineup — making the $79 unit less a replacement than a deliberately degraded entry point into Amazon's store.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing the $79 Kindle accept a giant lock-screen ad every time the device is off, trading the aesthetic polish of prior models for the lowest entry price yet.
- The Kindle 3 keeps its role as the full-price alternative, so Amazon is now segmenting the same product family by how much advertising a customer will tolerate.
Second-order effects
- Rival e-reader makers face pressure to match a $79 price point that only works if they too monetize the device through ads or content margins rather than hardware markup.
- Advertisers gain a persistent idle-state surface on millions of reading devices, giving Amazon inventory no other e-reader vendor currently offers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dedicated readers converge toward near-zero hardware prices funded by advertising and book sales, turning the e-reader from a product into a customer-acquisition channel for a retail ecosystem.
The trend: E-reader pricing is collapsing toward cost, with advertising on the device itself becoming the subsidy that makes sub-$100 hardware viable.