With each successive generation of electronic readers prices inevitably come down due to advances in technology and manufacturing. That begs the question, when are eBook readers going to get so cheap that they’ll be practically free? We saw Amazon launch a $79 Kindle back in September of last year, and as cheap as it is compared to the first Kindle, which launched in November 2007 for $400, it still isn’t $0. Harking back to the days of buying a subscription to a magazine so that you can receive a free gift in the mail, Barnes & Noble recently announced a promotion with the following discounts:
The Nook edition of People is $9.99 a month; with a one-year subscription, customers will receive a Nook Tablet, a color device with a 7-inch display, for $199, a discount from its regular price of $249. Customers who buy a one-year subscription for the Nook edition of The New York Times for $19.99 a month, which includes access to NYTimes.com, will receive a black-and-white Nook Simple Touch free or a Nook Color for $99.
The second sentence is when the shoe drops. Buy a 1 year subscription to the New York Times and you get yourself a brand spanking new electronic reader which half a decade ago would have cost as much as a pair of Amazon Kindle Fire Android tablets run today. This brings up yet another question, when will buying a 1 year subscription to the New York Times get you a free full blown tablet? Amazon is already selling the Fire at cost so that you can buy more stuff through their online store, so now it’s just a matter of time until the Fire is given away just to attract customers.
What do you think, are we soon going to enter into an era of disposable technology, made solely to lure customers into a digital ecosystem?