The kindle never ceases to amaze!

CHENNAI: The online portal Amazon has managed a masterstroke yet again. This  can be gauged from the sales figures that made rounds in the American media for its new Kindle launches. On the first day, after three new, cheaper and technologically better models were unveiled, estimates put the number of bookings for the new devices at one lakh in the US alone.But how do people from Chennai, especially those who already own an e-book reader, look at the improvements? Given the price at which Amazon was selling its previous models, now being renamed as the “Kindle keyboard,” people who could afford the device were far and few, though there was hardly any question about the utility of the gadget. Adding to this was the fact that the e-book major was yet to launch an India-centric website that could make transactions easier.However, the cheapest of the new kindle would cost one about half-the-price of the previous basic models. At 79 dollars for the ad-promoted version (ad-free version would cost $109), or just about `4000, the product could be well within the reach of a huge section in the Indian market, though shipping the device is still a cumbersome process without a country-specific web page.  Smriti Narayan, currently working for a competitor of Amazon in the US, says that most look at the cheaper versions as an attempt by the e-book major to jump into the developing markets of India and several other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.Moreover, while Kindle was the most famous product of Amazon, they still make a major share of their profits from books and e-book sales and this could further go up as Kindle becomes more and more affordable to a largely untapped market.Vidyut Chandrashekar, an alumni of the IIT-Madras, currently working for a software major, says that while the manner in which the new devices were launched could be surprising (very little pre-launch hype), the evolution to a touch model was inevitable as Amazon, for the first time since introducing the Kindle, was facing stiff competition from the likes of Barnes and Noble and Sony Reader Touch.“What we saw for the first time was Amazon catching up with its competitors with a realisation that touch is what the future is going to be,” he says.However, others, including major tech reviewers in the US, have pointed out that by getting rid of the keyboard entirely in their non-touch 79 dollar model, Amazon has struck at the very heart of interactivity which it pioneered when it first launched the e-book reader.Writes Bill Ray on The Register, “To understand why the keyboard was so central to the Kindle’s aspirations, it is important to remember that Kindle wasn’t supposed to be just an electronic book reader. The Kindle was supposed to be a new way of interacting with textual content and with dynamic content, which updated itself and invited consumer participation. It was supposed to be a physical embodiment of the Web 2.0 dream.”Agrees Nandini Parasuram, alumni of NALSAR who is currently working for a law firm, “This interactivity enriched the whole experience of reading on the Kindle. In fact, it was not just reading, but also collaboration that took the literature that you read well beyond just the viewpoint of the author.”