Beta test Kindle for only 500 bucks

Do you usu­ally pay to be a beta tester? Not me. I usu­ally get some­thing free for debug­ging somone’s product.

Well today Ama­zon released the big­ger dog of their reader and will charge you about $500 bucks for a device that looks like a card­board pro­to­type of a tech­nol­ogy prod­uct from the 80’s.

Expec­ta­tions for elec­tronic devices are con­sid­er­ably more sophis­ti­cated than what the Kin­dle offers. Now of course Ama­zon is just warm­ing up the mar­ket for a smart inno­v­a­tive com­pany like Apple or a smart startup to take over much like Apple did with the iPod. I actu­ally think that Ama­zon doesn’t care. Ama­zon is all about the dis­tri­b­u­tion chain. They want to sell you the con­tent not the device. They just cre­ated the device to cre­ate more inter­est in read­ing. Cer­tainly the pub­lish­ing indus­try doesn’t under­stand how to do that. But will this actu­ally rein­vig­o­rate the read­ing mar­ket? That remains to be seen.