Round up #109: Fire sold out, Agency Model cash settlement
The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.
Settling Agency Model publishers agree to consumer cash pay-out
According to this
Massachusetts’ AG (Attorney General) Martha Coakley has announced part of the settlement that may be approved from three of the publishers accused of conspiring to affect e-book prices under the Agency Model.
Affected consumers in Massachusetts would split up two million dollars out of a total sixty-nine million.
As is often the case in these situations, might guess is that might mean you would get a check for a few dollars.
This is not yet approved, and pay-outs wouldn’t happen right away (but it wouldn’t be long).
The compensation would be a lot less significant than the change in the business model going forward.
One of the interesting questions would be how having settled might advantage those publishers, versus the ones that keep fighting (along with Apple).
A couple of the publishers cited legal costs as seriously affecting their bottom lines in recent financial reports.
Apple can fight pretty much forever…hey, they just won an over a billion dollar settlement against Samsung, right? They’ve got the cash.
Macmillan and Penguin are rolling the dice by not settling, throwing in their lot with Apple. If Apple wins, they win…and they won’t have been part of the pay-out referenced by Coakley.
If Apple loses, or the case just goes on for years, they lose a lot of competitive ground to those who did settle (Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster).
Here’s the official statement from Coakley’s office:
Thanks to reader Diane Fowler for alerting me to this story….I had already seen it in Flipboard, but I really appreciate it when people take the time to link a story for me.
Amazon Appstore opens in Europe
In this
Amazon announces that the Amazon Appstore is now available in the U.K., Germany,France, Italy and Spain.
This could certainly be in advance of the Kindle Fire going international, which is one of the things that might be announced at a presser by Amazon on September 6th.
You can get it here:
http://www.amazon.com/getappstore
Kindle Fire sold out
While I was writing this Round up, a new press release from Amazon announced that the Kindle Fire is sold out!
In it, Jeff Bezos says:
“Kindle Fire is sold out, but we have an exciting roadmap ahead—we will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”
There’s your clear (almost) announcement of a new Fire or other Android tablet being announced soon! That means I’m going to shoot this post out now, so you know. 
Update: just a little more speculation/analysis on the Fire being “sold out”. That surprised me: I had anticipated that the current model (um, yesterday’s current model) would continue to be available, but at a reduced price. This could mean an actual discontinuation of it…or it might be that they had to turn over the production chain to a different model for now, and will bring this one back. It’s a bit odd that Amazon would go almost a week with their top seller unavailable. I can see a few possibilities for doing that:
- They don’t make that much money on the Fire unit, so they can have it out for a week without a huge loss
- They want to clear out refurbs
- They’ll announce a new model before September 6, and use the Sixth as the hands-on introduction (and include other announcements)
What do you think? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
August 30, 2012 at 4:26 pm |
Since they don’t have the option for you to order a Fire and wait until they make more, I also think that it might be a telltale sign of a new model in the near future. It will be interesting to see if those who are selling them used through Amazon will up their prices once they know there is now a “shortage.”
August 30, 2012 at 5:14 pm |
So, your take is that the new Kindles will be available for purchase shortly after the announcement?
Using my Nexus 7 has me thinking the previously unthinkable: forgoing my e-ink Kindle for a next-generation Fire. (I already own a first-gen Fire and Kindle Touch.)
I don’t what to hijack the thread but the inconsistent formatting of e-books, especially when it comes to fonts, is driving me to distraction. I am constantly having to change font size, often within the same book. Reading has become anything but “friction-less” on the Kindle Touch.
Tablets like the Nexus 7 and the new Fire — assuming Amazon shaves some of the weight off — have more display flexibility. Also, call me shallow but I kind of like the page turning animation. Amazon should adopt something like this in the new Fire and lose the slide show effect.
August 30, 2012 at 8:41 pm |
My guess: Amazon wants to minimize the number of returned Fires it’ll have to process after Sept. 6.
August 31, 2012 at 7:21 pm |
Thanks for writing, Roger!
Excellent point! Amazon allows returns of Kindle devices within 30 days of purchase.
However, I’m not quite sure on the timing…does that suggest, then, that people won’t be able to order the next gen until the end of September? It could just be to minimize, but not eliminate, those returns, as you suggest.
August 31, 2012 at 6:17 pm |
I think the main thing is that the new devices are going to be so much better that nobody will want to buy a Fire One at a price that even approaches profitability for Amazon. I think 8GB storage considerably limited its potential for media consumption and hence profits, so Amazon is happy to kill it and move on to better things.
August 31, 2012 at 7:18 pm |
Thanks for writing, Tom!
It’s been their #1 bestseller, though…why not wait until those new options are available? Why lose the sales in-between?