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The new Kindle ad features a new tagline – “The book lives on”:

Two interesting strategic elements come out of this spot.

First, Kindle keeps taking on iPad and tablets. It’s not only the glare, but the weight, the battery life, the coolness as portrayed by the look and feel of the spot. Kindle fully dominates the market for dedicated e-readers and electronic books. But it is threatened on the long term by multimedia content and multi-purpose tablets. It’s a classic case where a dominant player needs to establish/extend/defend the category, rather than being concerned with in-category competitors.

Only partly linked with this is the tag-line, which I think shows how Amazon thinks about books. Their bet is on electronic books, not on paper. That is again fully logical, since with Kindle they fully lock their customers, while the same is not happening with paper books. I also fully believe in the death of the physical book on the longer term (with some survivors like albums etc.), but that is not necessarily the main point here. This is about controlling the platform consumers will consume media on in the future and thus getting a commission out of every sale – eventually e-readers and tablets will converge. If I’d be Amazon, I’d lower Kindle prices even more. They would more than make up for that in the future.