New Kindles start shipping today in Europe, Lovefilm launches on Kindle Fire
As promised, Amazon has started shipping its latest Kindles on the other side of the Atlantic, with the Kindle Paperwhite as well as the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD making the trip.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a year-long staging operation: after the Kindle Fire's UK arrival was reported back in December 2011 and the Kindle Touch reached Europe in March with no Fire news, Amazon spent August laying groundwork by launching its Appstore across five European countries 'ahead of possible tablet launch'. Two weeks ago it switched on the Lending Library in the UK, Germany and France. The shipping date is when that content scaffolding finally has hardware to run on.
The lineup itself signals a portfolio pruning: per confirmed reports from October 22, the Kindle Touch and large-screen Kindle DX are discontinued, leaving the Paperwhite as the flagship e-reader while the Fire and Fire HD carry the tablet fight. Bundling Lovefilm streaming onto the Fire at launch means the device arrives in Europe as a media endpoint, not just a tablet.
First-order effects
- European buyers can now order the Paperwhite, Fire and Fire HD directly rather than importing, and Lovefilm subscribers get a native streaming app on the Fire from day one.
- The Touch and DX discontinuations force existing European e-reader customers onto the Paperwhite tier, consolidating Amazon's e-reader line around one lit-screen model.
Second-order effects
- Rival tablets in Europe — Apple's iPad and Google's Nexus 7 among them — now face a device whose economics are subsidized by an already-localized stack: Appstore, Lending Library and Lovefilm all went live before the hardware did.
- Publishers and magazine titles that signed on for the Fire Newsstand (GQ and Wired were named in earlier coverage) gain a second geographic market for their Fire-format editions without new distribution work.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Amazon's international launches will keep leading with services before silicon — content licensing and storefronts as the moat, hardware priced as the delivery mechanism — pushing tablet competition toward ecosystem breadth rather than spec sheets.
The trend: Amazon is exporting its integrated device-plus-content model to Europe, turning each hardware launch into a coordinated rollout of store, library and video services.