Amazon’s unveiling of the Kindle Fire tablet computer sends a bright-hot message: The online retailer is ready to rival iPad maker Apple (AAPL) in an effort to be the world’s top digital content provider.
It may sound odd coming from a company that pioneered online sales of physical products, selling its first book, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought,” in 1995. But since it first entered the digital market in 2006 with its video download store, Amazon has bet consumers will pay for high-quality digital content.
In addition to the millions of actual items it sells, which range from toys to toothbrushes, Amazon’s trove of digital content now includes more than 1 million e-books, 100,000 movies and TV shows and 17 million songs. This is about 1 million fewer songs than iPad maker Apple sells, but more than twice as many e-books and many thousands more TV shows and movies.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is confident that its content will help the Kindle Fire do better than others who have trotted out tablets.
“The reason they haven’t been successful is because they made tablets. They didn’t make services,” CEO Jeff Bezos said.
Bezos, the 47-year-old former Wall Street money manager, built Amazon on exactly this sort of confidence. He started the company on the theory that a Web-based book store would resonate with consumers, since it seemed like the easiest way to browse millions of titles at once.
He was right. The company grew rapidly, and Amazon began trading publicly in May 1997, despite never having turned a profit. It took five more years — and the addition of product categories like CDs, DVDs and consumer electronics — before the online retailer reported any net income. These days, Amazon consistently reports strong growth: In the most recent quarter, it earned $191 million on $9.91 billion in revenue.
Amazon has long toiled in Apple’s shadow. With the arrival of Apple’s iPod digital music player, which first came out in 2001, Apple figured consumers would be willing to pay for legal, high-quality digital music they could download to the devices.
Apple became a major player early on, making deals with major record labels to sell digital tunes through its iTunes Store in 2003. Soon the iPod became more multimedia-savvy: Apple added TV shows in 2005 and movie downloads a year later.
Amazon soon entered the market itself, rolling out its own digital video downloading service in 2006 and music downloading service a year later.
It was in 2007, though that things really heated up. That’s when Amazon rolled out its first Kindle e-reader, upending the book market once again by turning the focus from costly paper books to electronic ones that could be delivered quickly and cheaply to customers on a reading device.
The Kindle rapidly grew the company’s e-book business, and Amazon said in May that it was selling more e-books than physical copies of books. But the Kindle Fire’s ability to show e-books, surf the Web, stream movies and TV shows and support apps positions it as an even better catalyst for Amazon’s digital goods sales.
The price will probably help, too: When it goes on sale Nov. 15, it will cost $199, less than half of the $499 you’ll pay for Apple’s cheapest iPad and $50 less than book seller Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color e-reader.
