Amazon, Kindle, and the Apple Tablet

I spotted a piece of news today from Mashable claiming that for the first time, Kindle e-Books outsold real books. This is interesting for a couple of reasons…

First off, unlike Apple which is in the hardware business and make high margin on iPod sales but little to no margin on music sold through the iTunes Music Store, I believe that Amazon sees the Kindle as a mechanism to sell content rather than a hardware business unto itself.

iSuppli, a company that takes apart consumer electronics and estimates their cost of manufacture, shows that although Amazon is making some margin on the Kindle, it’s nowhere close to the 100%+ markup that Apple routinely enjoys on their iPods.

The other interesting thing is that the Kindle app on the iPhone already let’s you read books you’ve bought from Amazon on a device that is not a Kindle.

The worst-kept Apple secret ever is that they are working on a Tablet device that should be released some time early in 2010.

If rumours are to be believed, it will probably sport a hybrid LCD/e-Ink multi-touch display that can play back video in full colour and also display crisp text without a backlight in full sunlight. The screen technology that seems to be the best candidate for the Tablet is from a company called Pixel Qi, a company making a hybrid screen in a convenient 10″ size, perfect for a tablet computer.

Now we add this little nugget from TechCrunch in which Steve Jobs talks about eBooks:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

It all stacks up to a possible future where Apple sells a fantastic multi-purpose device that can act as a very good eBook reader by running a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon.

It’s possible that Jobs has cut a deals with book publishers in the same way he cut deals with the major music labels before the launch of the iTunes Music Store, but I think it’s unlikely.

What do you think? Will Steve add books to the iTunes Store, or will the Apple Tablet run a Kindle app that allows purchases from Amazon?

Perhaps both options can co-exist?

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