Finally I saw amazon.com's Kindle in use today. I still did not get to touch it or play with it. I saw some someone reading it on BART. This is also the first time I ever saw anyone using Kindle in public. I was a little surprised by it size, I shouldn't be. It is almost the size of a paperback. While the amazon.com gives its specifications and posted many pictures it somehow did not stick until I finally saw one. (The photo is a UG content from amazon.com)
amazon.com was sold out on its first batch of Kindles. Now you can order one. You can buy it only from amazon.com. This direct sales approach does impact market uptake, but I wonder if this is a deliberate strategy by amazon.com than a oversight, at least in the early stages. They may not want the whole world to buy the version 1.0 of the product, and may have much cooler things coming up. They may also not want to price the product for the mass market and would want to wait until their costs go down. I think amazon.com will go for the market share with the version 1.2 of their product.
While amazon.com may not yet want to capture the wallet share of people who are not willing to buy at current price levels it should try and capture their mind share now, preparing them for the next revision. It should provide a few Kindles, loaded with books, to university and public libraries, to expose people to this amazing new second coming of books. If people are exposed to Kindle, it should not be from isolated sightings but through no cost immersion experience.
I look forward to amazon.com donating a few Kindles to Haas's Thomas Long Library.
If you are dying to buy me a gift, please do buy me a Kindle.
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