The Amazon Kindle is a revolutionary, game-changing product. They’re doing well, despite the fact that they’re still not profitable. What’s the most shocking to me is its underutilization in the classroom. More than any other potential customer for the Amazon Kindle (or Sony Reader), the college and high school student stands to gain the most. Sure, it’s a great tool for travelers and people who read all the time – imagine carrying a Kindle and a charger while backpacking across Europe instead of having to search for books in English at every stop. It’s a splendid tool for someone with vision problems who needs a large print size – the selection is much greater on the Kindle than at bookstores. However, their numbers pale in comparison to the number of students who could use the Kindle. Here’s how the Kindle can reach its target audience, and how colleges can benefit too.
How do you get a Kindle into every child’s hand in a school? Form alliances with the schools. Create partnerships with universities and colleges. Honestly, as most hardware retailers give discounts for bulk purchases, I can’t imagine that Amazon wouldn’t want to give a 10% discount to NYU if they bought 4,000 Kindles every single year for their freshman class. I mean, Oprah viewers got $50 off.
Before universities say, “What? A Kindle for every student, that’s ridiculous!” yearly tuition at NYU is roughly $40,000 a year. A Kindle for every student would take up roughly 0.2% of a student’s tuition over 4 years. Even if the student dropped out after 1 year, he’d add less than 1% to his tuition for that year by buying a Kindle, and hey, he’d still have a Kindle upon dropping out for personal use. That’s hardly an outrageous request. Besides, on average I took 4 classes a semester in college.
Considering I took some classes with cheap textbooks as well as some classes like Economics (my major) with $150+ textbooks, let’s just say I spent an average of $250 per semester on books. Over 4 years, that’s $2,000 on textbooks. Sony advertises the average cost savings to be at least 20-40% less for eBooks than books. Let’s assume that textbooks are at that upper end (much lower printing costs, etc.) Assuming maybe not all books can be found as eBooks, we’ll take 40% off of $1,500. So the students would save at least $600 over the course of their 4 year education. In addition, they won’t have to deal with back problems, lugging 3 textbooks across campus, their carbon footprint will be much smaller, and they’ll be able to access all of their textbooks 15 years later, as opposed to buying them again later – all factors that reduce future costs.
This is money students have to spend anyway, and hey, let the student opt out if they really don’t want the savings. No big deal. It’s a no-brainer for college students – cheaper books and a discounted Kindle. So how would it work for colleges? A few colleges are partnering with Kindle already, but any colleges to create this type of program could probably still receive a huge discount from Amazon. Promising that 4,000 students will purchase $1,000 in books over 4 years? I think you’d have quite a bit of leverage. Especially when you point out that you can make a deal with the Sony Reader instead. Not to mention it’s a great press move – eliminating the use of millions of book pages every year would be fantastic for the environment. And clearly it’d be a great move for Amazon. Let’s say just 20 universities pick up the program – even if they dropped profits to make only $10 per Kindle, it’d be a program that earned $800,000 each year on Kindle sales alone. If they earned on average 20% on each book sold, it’d earn another $3.2 million annually. If 100 universities picked it up, it’d be a $20 million/year program with an additional 400,000 Kindles sold each year. Sales numbers are not public, but I can’t imagine that they’d shun the idea of an additional half million Kindles sold.
Oh, and Amazon isn’t interested in this at all, replace every “Kindle” in this blog post with “Sony Reader,” rinse and repeat.
