TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Marco Arment:

Gizmodo and the like probably don’t care that the Kindle is the perfect device for so many uses like this that people encounter on a regular basis in Real Life. But Kindle owners, and Amazon, don’t need them to.

He explains why the Kindle is his favored reading device.

This just points, though, to the reality that the Kindle is a niche device.

Most current digital publications are simple text (ebooks, online articles), so the Kindle’s e-ink screen functions well for this. The lack of color and inability to quickly refresh the screen aren’t an issue. But as we move more types of publications onto digital devices, this will change. Magazines don’t work on current e-ink screens and interactive elements certainly don’t work.

This may change as color e-ink-like screens with quick refresh ability develop more, but allowing publishers to publish their content in this manner would require a very serious platform. Amazon would have to invest an incredible amount of time and money into developing a publishing platform that can compete with others who are already know how to develop good software. It would be a tremendous risk for Amazon.1

I don’t think Amazon’s intent is to develop the Kindle into a general publishing platform. Rather, they are trying to make a book software platform, so you can read your Kindle Store books on any device you have. In this view, the Kindle is just one device among many for reading your Kindle books. The focus is the Kindle Store, not the Kindle.

In this view, Amazon did not cut the Kindle’s price to $189 and add a WiFi-only $139 model just in response to the Barnes and Noble Nook price change, but also to serve as an affordable way to use the Kindle Store. The Kindle is the cheap gateway to the store. The more Kindle users there are, the more Kindle Store users there are, too. Amazon wants to dominate the store part.

Seth Godin thinks the Kindle should get even cheaper—closer to $50 than $140. So cheap that if your Kindle breaks, gets soaked in water, or you leave it on the subway, you’ll just go out and buy another one. Godin calls it a “paperback Kindle.”

That’s brilliant and is exactly what Amazon should be shooting for: a no-frills Kindle that everyone can afford. I would buy one immediately to complement my iPad.

1. Somewhat contradictory to this is Amazon’s Kindle developer program. They certainly could build a color, quick-refresh Kindle and use third-party developers to build richer publishing applications, but I don’t think this is the case. This would still require them to build a very powerful SDK and these applications would not function on other Kindle devices, like iPhone and iPad. [↩]