Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle Offered Free for Some

It was only recently that the idea of Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) highly popular Kindle will be offered free, and that has become a reality for some, as it is being bundled by Carphone Warehouse - the mobile phone retailer in Europe - which will offer Wi-Fi Kindles for free upon the purchase of a two-year contract on select mobile phones.

There can be no doubt that this will eventually expand, especially as if sales for the contract soar because of the Kindle factor.

Along with Amazon's effort to compete with Netflix by offering free streaming content with every Prime membership, this free Kindle push could be a means to maintain an e-reader lead against Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad, Barnes and Noble's (NYSE:BKS) Nook, and the Sony Reader (NYSE:SNE). Still, there's little worry about Kindle abandonment in light of iPad's success. In fact, there's actually an increase in Kindle ownership. Lunden writes:

"In a poll of those buying the iPad 2 over the first weekend of sales found that 24 percent owned a Kindle, compared to 13 percent of original iPad buyers having a Kindle. And only 6 percent use their iPad 2 as an e-reading device, down from 19 percent of those surveyed during the launch of the first iPad," said Paid Content's Ingrid Lunden.

Amazon was trading at $164.01, down $1.07, or 0.65 percent, as of 2:27 PM EDT.




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