It’s been eighteen months since Amazon released the Kindle Scribe, and I still can’t figure out their motivation behind it, or why it’s on sale all the time at what seems to be unusually low prices.
The Kindle Scribe is the only Kindle currently on sale at Amazon, and it starts at $239 for the 16GB model with the basic stylus, which is $100 off the regular price. The 32GB version with the premium pen is $279, which is $110 off. Plus Amazon is giving an additional $40 off when purchasing two.
Most people probably don’t think there’s anything unusual about those prices, but compared to similar 10″ eNotes on the market and compared to past and current Kindles the price of the Kindle Scribe is much lower.
Most other 10″ eNotes never come close to $300, much less $239. The Kobo Elipsa 2E is currently on sale for $349 ($50 off) and that’s the lowest price it’s ever hit, and this is only the second time it’s been on sale in the past year.
Onyx’s 10″ Note Air3 sells for $399, and it set a new low price for Onyx when it came out. The color version costs $100 more, and Onyx almost never does sales; they just discount them when they’re getting replaced by a new model.
The Remarkable 2 also starts at $399, pretty much the standard price for most 10″ eNotes. Bigme sells a black and white 10″ model for $389.
So how is Amazon regularly selling the Kindle Scribe for under $250? It’s not like they can make a fortune off of people taking notes. There’s also the fact that the Kindle Scribe is the only black and white model with a 300 ppi screen; all the others listed above have lower resolution 227 ppi screens.
The price of the Kindle Scribe doesn’t make sense when compared to other Kindles either.
Right now the Kindle Scribe is only $50 more expensive than the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition. The Scribe has a much larger screen, it comes with a stylus, it has a premium metal housing, and it adds notetaking functionality.
Six months ago Amazon was still selling the 8GB Kindle Oasis for $249 with ads (the Scribe doesn’t have ads), and the 32GB model was $279 with ads, and Amazon kept selling them for full price up until the end despite the Oasis’s hardware being outdated by a couple years compared to other models. For most of its run, Amazon rarely put the Kindle Oasis on sale. They only did so a couple times a year, usually on Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
Some people have been hoping for a Kindle Scribe Mini, or something to fill the gap between the Kindle Paperwhite and the Scribe now that the Kindle Oasis is gone, but how would they price it with the current Scribe on sale all the time for only $50 more than the Signature Edition Paperwhite?
The low price is good for customers, but it doesn’t make sense on multiple levels.
