If you’re traveling over the holiday weekend and forgot to grab enough reading material, you’ll be able to get everything you need at the airport. Not just the latest trade paperback by Stephenie Meyer or Dan Brown, either — now you can get an eReader on the go. Amazon (AMZN) just struck a deal to sell Kindle eReaders in stores at airports across the United States this week.
But don’t think this a big innovation from Amazon. It turns out many airport retail outlets selling Apple Inc. (AAPL) products are now stocking the iPad too. That means that despite the Kindle’s dominance of the eReader marketplace, it may already be playing catch-up with Apple’s newest gadget when it comes to airport sales. (A tip for foreign travellers: Dixons Travel at London’s Heathrow airport were discounting iPads 20 pounds this week while supplies last!)
No realistic investor thinks that airport sales will make or break either device. But Amazon’s counterpunch on this issue before the long weekend underscores its desire to flex its muscle on the Kindle — before it cedes any more ground to the red-hot iPad.
Here are the details regarding the Kindle sales deal: HMSHost’s stores, which include retail outlets like Simply Books and Authors Bookstores, will offer pre-charged Kindles, letting customers looking for some high-tech literature grab a device and start downloading eBooks immediately. Amazon has gotten aggressive in getting readers interested in the Kindle this June. At the beginning of the month, Amazon started selling the Kindle at Target (TGT) retail chains (get details on the Target-Kindle sales deal). Just weeks later, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189, a price dropped matched by Barnes & Noble‘s (BKS) Nook eReader the same day.
The Kindle has been good for Amazon — and bad for traditional print book business. Barnes & Noble stock hit an 18 month low yesterday as the bookseller provided a weak outlook and vowed to spend more on digital opportunities like its Kindle competitor the Nook. But B&N has a tough row to hoe unseating the Kindle, the world’s eReader of choice with an estimated 3 million Kindle’s already sold.
But Amazon’s biggest bounce due to the Kindle has passed, with shares peaking at around $150 in April and sliding about -25% since then. The device, despite only being three years old, is already starting to look like a dinosaur in some techies’ minds compared to the versatile Apple Inc. iPad.
Released this past April, roughly 1.5 million people have purchased an iPad and the device’s sexy design and broad functionality have made it a much more attractive purchase for people in the market for an eReader. Amazon itself are trying to find ways to integrate their Kindle technology and e-book business into Apple’s popular machines. When Apple released the iPhone 4 last week, Amazon updated the Kindle application sold in the Apple App Store. The new Kindle app supports multimedia e-books as well, with video and audio content that the actual Kindle eReader can’t feature right now.
Down the road you can bet that Amazon will produce a Kindle with more bells and whistles to maintain its dominance of the eReader market, fend off the iPad and tap into broader digital uses. But the first step is hooking people on the initial product – via lower prices, brick-and-mortar points of sale and whatever else AMZN can come up with.
