Thursday, April 8, 2010

Kindle to be sold at Target? By Apr 25? Best Buy? Update1

Engadget's Nilay Patel is reporting that The Amazon Kindle may actually be available at Target stores come April 25.  MAJOR news if true.

Patel writes: "We've always wondered if and when Amazon would get the Kindle into brick-and-mortar stores to counteract the see-it-with-your-eyes marketing advantage held by competitors like Barnes and Noble, and it looks like we just got our answer -- this is a shot of a Target inventory handheld showing a listing for Amazon's e-reader.

We're told that the in-store date is April 25, so we'll be keeping an eye out -- and we're definitely curious to see if Amazon's retail packaging for stores is any flashier than the current Kindle box. "

Engadget thanks "zeroleonheart" - I hope that's a very good source :-).

UPDATE1 - 4/8/10 - Original posting 4/7/10, 1:42 PM

Now, Engadget's Nilay Patel has a story on the Nook being sold at Best Buy, which makes sense since the forever-delayed iRex DR800SG e-reader was due to use Barnes and Noble's online e-bookstore but be sold at Best Buy (where the price tag had been set for $445 before iRex did the first of several postponements).


KINDLE AT BEST BUY? as well as the Nook?
A long-time commenter at Engadget, David Wixom has posted that he is an employee of Best Buy (sells cameras there) and says today that:

  "I have a feeling we are going to start selling the Kindle at Best Buy as well seeing as we just got cases for them in on the truck today.  I find it hard to believe we will sell cases for a product we don't sell."

  My impression is that the comment is genuine (not rumor-mongering), as he identifies himself, unlike the bulk of anonymous posters -- although it's hard to know what the boxes might be about.  It's strange to think of the Kindle selling at Best Buy for some reason. David also has some really nice photo galleries up at http://davidwixom.smugmug.com, one of the best photo sites around.

  UPDATE - 5/12/10 - Since the above at Best Buy did not materialize at this point, I think that someone or David referred to "cases for them" referring to them as "Kindle" in a generic way for an e-reader device, in this case the Nook, since that was exactly when the Nooks were arriving. [See update in next paragraph.]

  FURTHER UPDATE - There was a post in the Amazon Kindle forums on June 13 from tigerbeat who wrote that when people were unable to find Kindles at Target for some time:
"Best Buy even had a Kindle cover and they don't even sell Kindles."
so David wasn't mistaken there.

  I have seen forum posts referring to seeing some "Kindles" at stores in the past, and that these were "Kindles made by Sony" ! -- but the Kindle has become a sort of generic word in the way "kleenex" or "xerox" have.



Check often: Latest free non-classics, shortcut  http://bit.ly/latestfreenonclassics Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle


(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

4 comments:

  1. Hmmm....Any idea if that will include the DX as well? I won't be getting one until probably December of 2010 but I would love to work with one before I buy it. Of course by work I mean play with it.

    I love new toys!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Igotnothing,
    No idea re whether it involves the DX. I saw only what you did. I love my DX, beyond the small one, but they need to lower the price at this point AND also add editing of PDFs.

    When I went to the other end of the world for 3 weeks, that's the one I felt I had to have with me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wonder if they'll be able to discount it all from Amazon's retail price.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tomster,
    That'd be nice - I suppose if they pay Amazon the same amount and decide to take a bit of a cut in the revenue they could.

    The Sonys were not on discount there when I saw them though.

    ReplyDelete

NOTE: TO AVOID SPAM being posted instantly, this blog uses the blogger.com "DELAY" feature.

Am often away much of the day, and postings won't show up right away. Posts done to use referrer-links may never show up.

Usually, am online enough to release comments within a day though, so the hard-to-read match-text tests for commenting won't be needed this way.

Feedback and questions are welcome. Thanks for participating.

Technical Problems?
If you're having problems leaving a Comment, Google's blogger-help asks that you clear the 'blogger.com' cookies on your browser's Tools or Options menu bar and that will fix the Comment-box problems (until they have a permanent fix).

IF that doesn't work either, then UNcheck the "keep me signed in" box -- Google-help says that should allow your comment to post (it's a workaround to a current bug).
Apologies for the problems.

TIP: There's a size limit. If longer than 3500 characters or so, in a text editor, make two posts out of it.

[Valid RSS]