Is Amazon’s Kindle 2 price cut a distraction from the DX?

Thursday, July 9, 2009 7:20

Marking the second generation Kindle’s fifth month of availability and its passage into the “majority phase” of the Rogers adoption curve, Amazon has lopped 15% of the popular e-reader’s price. The device’s price today was dropped to 9.

Though Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the company may never disclose the Kindle’s sales figures, an estimated 300,000 Kindle 2 units were reportedly shipped in April. In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, which has actually struggled to keep up with demand.

Amazon reportedly sold out of its first batch of Kindle DX’s in just 72 hours, and less than two weeks later, it again sold out “due to heavy customer demand” (according to the stock unavailability message on the site), and currently carries a four to six week wait for the next batch. The 6-inch Kindle 2, on the other hand, is available immediately.

While not an Earth-shattering reduction by any means, it could serve to bait customers away from ordering the perpetually unavailable DX, and usher in a new group of fledgling e-literates.