August 25, 2011
By the ZippyCart Content Team
Do you have a Kindle? Read lots of books on your iPad with the Kindle App? Then you’re in luck! Today, Amazon announced the Kindle Daily Deal program, which will feature a different Kindle eBook everyday at a discounted price. Think of it as a Groupon for all the bookworms out there! Depending on the quality of the selected titles (hopefully this won’t be exclusively for the bargain basement/romance novel titles) this promises to be very interesting for feverish readers and deal seekers.
The first book is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo, a Newbery award-winning author. The eBook normally sells for $5.59, but is on sale for 75 percent off ($1.39) for the duration of the deal today. This seems like a great sign of things to come: not only is Kate Dicamillo is a Newberry award-winning author, and the title has received a 4.5-star collective rating from its 332 Amazon reviewers.
This is not a new approach to getting products in shopping carts for the ecommerce solution. Amazon offers a similar program with its Android Appstore, offering one premium app per day for free. Amazon MP3 also offers daily deals, accessible via the company’s Twitter account.
In fact, Amazon has taken a keen interest in the daily deal marketplace, and the Kindle offer is just the most recent development. The ecommerce solution has invested in daily deal service Living Social, and also purchased daily deal ecommerce solution Woot in 2010. They also launched the AmazonLocal deal service in markets including Seattle and Boise. Amazon says the Kindle Daily Deal will be refreshed each day at midnight on Twitter, and on the Kindle Daily Post blog. The deals also appear on the product page for the selected title.
This is also great news for all those lucky shoppers who managed to get a discontinued HP TouchPad into their shopping carts. HP recently announced their plan to pull out of the hardware business, and therefore issued a liquidation notice for its line of Tablets and Smartphones. The TouchPad has a native Kindle App, which essentially turn the product into the cheapest eReader on the market at $99 for the 16GB version. Unfortunately, even keen shoppers and deal hunters who added the item to their online shopping carts have been disappointed by mistakes in inventory management and have since seen their orders cancelled by retailers. More stock is reported to be on the way, although no ETA could be given.
The Kindle is one of Amazon’s top selling products. Early adopters have been familiar with Kindle since 2007, when the very first Kindle came on the market. It started at $399 and sold out in five hours. Since then Amazon has produced major new additions to the line about every two years or so, with interstitial updates (different options packages, international versions, etc.) in the intervening times. Most recently they released a priced-to-own/priced-to-move version of their least expensive model, the Kindle 3 (Wi-Fi only), preloaded with a limited collection of screensaver ads and special offers for a reduced price. Consumers can now add the Kindle 3 to their shopping cart for $114, or the Wi-Fi and 3G version for $139. The item has the most 5-Star reviews of any product for sale on Amazon.
Taylor is originally from Washington, DC, but has lived in the Seattle area for the past 5 years. He’s a senior at the University of Washington, studying Political Science (with no interest in entering the political world). He’s more interested in the Tech industry, especially consumer electronics, cloud computing, and how mobile internet and devices will change the business world. He spends most of his free time tinkering with his Subaru and surfing whenever possible.
