It's a tricky little issue: What if you designed a piece of hardware and were also the only one who sold the software for it? You'd basically have to work twice as hard at sales to get the job done.
That's the problem Amazon is now grappling with regarding the Kindle. While Amazon is a huge retailer (it just hit #100 on the Fortune 500), it's still a dwarf compared with the big mainstream retail outfits like Walmart, and with no physical stores where people can actually try out the device, its clout is ultimately limited.
To make the Kindle into a hit, Amazon's got a lot of heavy lifting to do, promoting both the reader and the ebooks for it, both of which can only be purchased at one place.
That may be about to change: Amazon may soon begin selling the Kindle through other retailers, particularly Target. (I've heard Best Buy mentioned in whispers as well.)
Reports claim that Target will launch the "small," six-inch Kindle on April 25 at a price of $259 U.S., the same as it costs from Amazon directly.
If true, this is probably a shrewd move on Amazon's behalf, as ebook readers are about to positively explode on the market. Barnes & Noble's Nook is finally hitting its stride and is on the shelves at thousands of B&N locations, and many of the new models we saw at CES earlier this year, like the Alex eReader, are on the cusp of launching.
And then there's the not-so-small issue of the Apple iPad, muddying up the ebook-reader market considerably already.
Amazon's response, as Electronista notes, has been to begin advertising the Kindle more heavily, with TV ads launching in recent weeks. But it probably knows it has to do more if it wants to hang on to the tenuous lead it has in the ereader space.
Stay tuned to see if the rumours pan out: April 25 is this Sunday.
Tech Insider
