Amazon Kindle Goes on a World Tour

Amazon just dropped the price of its Kindle from $299 to $259, and is apparently adding an international version for $279 that will work on GSM networks abroad. The company plans to sell the new Kindle in 100 countries.

It looks to me as if Kindle is going to win the eReader wars; they have the capital and the distribution network to do it. And as the prices come down, I think these devices will rapidly start penetrating the mass market. At $299, you have to be a pretty big reader to make this worthwhile. But once you bring it under $200, it starts to make sense for more and more people. It will never be as common as the iPod or cell phone, but the time is pretty quickly coming when it won't attract questions from strangers when I pull it out.