Amazon promises Kindle content across more devices

Online retail giant Amazon.com is drawing a clear distinction between its Kindle portable e-reader device and its related digital content efforts, with CEO Jeff Bezos maintaining his firm's hardware and software efforts are separate businesses. Speaking Monday at a Wired-sponsored conference on disruptive business models, Bezos said Amazon plans to make Kindle titles available on mobile devices beyond Apple's iPhone: "The device team has the job of making the most remarkable purpose-built reading device in the world," Bezos said, according to The New York Times. "We are going to give the device team competition. We will make Kindle books, at the same $9.99 price points, available on the iPhone, and other mobile devices and other computing devices." Bezos also said that in the future, the Kindle device will support new content formats, citing improved support for Adobe's PDF file formatting found on the latest Kindle model.

However, Bezos said Amazon does not want either e-books or e-readers to subsidize the other, admitting that the firm did consider selling the Kindle with a lower upfront price while requiring a monthly subscription fee or mandating that consumers purchase a minimum number of books. "My opinion, and so far the market has responded to our approach, is very simple," he said. "Instead of driving the cogitative complexity of a two-year commitment, tell people, ‘This is the actual cost of the device.'" Bezos did say Amazon would again revisit the subject if consumers demanded alternative Kindle pricing models, but added that he frowns on the idea: "I personally like the cogitative simplicity of saying, ‘Buy the device and use it or don't use it.'"

For more on Bezos' Kindle insight:
- read this New York Times article [1]

Related articles:
Amazon [2] to sell Kindle ebooks via iPhone
Google takes on Amazon [3] Kindle with mobile ebooks