Amazon has just fired over 100 people in their devices and services group yesterday. These people worked on the Kindle, Echo speakers and the Alexa voice assistant. The Amazon Kindle is a shadow of what it once was, there is no innovation on the hardware side of things and Amazon just sees it as a gateway to sell more e-books.
This is not the first time that Amazon has culled the Kindle division. In late 2022 they fired 11,000 staff which worked on Alexa, Kindle, Echo Buds, and Fire tablets. At the time, Amazon stated that all of these products were unprofitable and losing $5 billion annually. Most of these devices are loss leaders because Amazon normally subsidizes the cost to get more market share.
It is likely with this new staff layoff, that the same products continue to be unprofitable, likely losing even more money in the past few years. According to the global tablet sales from the first quarter of the year, Amazon fell out of the top 10 for the first time. The Amazon Kindle Scribe and Colorsoft are hardly selling any units, people are just buying the more affordable e-readers.
The Amazon devices and services team responsible for the Kindle have been alienating their long-term customers. They killed off the USB-File Transfer system, forced upgraded Kindle for PC and are stopping older versions of Kindle for Android from working, in a bid to get people to upgrade to the latest version. Lots of people have fled to rivals such as Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Onyx Boox and other brands.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.