Kindle Fire Costs More to Produce Than Retail Price

With the caveat that this is one particular teardown analysis, and not necessarily utterly definitive, here's an analysis -- which I missed the first time around, last fall -- that makes the case that Amazon's shiny new $199 e-reader costs them $201.70 to build.

This does fit with my own thinking, so I tend to believe it, but it also fits with Amazon's actual behavior over the past fifteen years: they've always been willing to pay a lot to buy marketshare.

Note that, if this is true, Amazon not only sells Kindle devices at a loss but also demonstrably sells a lot of Kindle content at a loss.There are terms of art used to describe such things....