Swankmotron put me onto this post at The Technium that makes some interesting and potentially true points. Basically, in 2009 John Walkenbach noticed something interesting about the price of the Kindle. The price was steadily dropping and if it continued in this way it would become free in November 2011. What an interesting idea right? Well we don’t know what Amazon is thinking…until Kevin Kelly writes:

Since then I’ve mentioned this forecast to all kinds of folks. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, “Oh, you noticed that!” And then smiled again.

So Amazon is doing this on purpose and they were apparently waiting for someone to be paying attention and notice. They weren’t exactly keeping it a secret just not openly talking about it. So what kind of plan would they be moving towards if they were going give away free Kindles? I would assume a cell phone like subscription plan where you get the Kindle free on contract and then you have to buy X amount of dollars per month in books/games/newspapers. I’m not sure how much people would like the idea of being contracted to buy books unless the price point was pretty low. With talk and data plans on phone already pretty damn high adding another bill would drive me nuts unless it were around the $20 range. But as Kelly points out people at Amazon are already on this and looking at Prime Subscribers.

Right now Prime gets you free 2 day shipping and starting last week free streaming video just like Netflix. I’m already on board with Prime, I order enough stuff that I’m ok with that $80 a year so that I’m not paying shipping on every purchase and now that we have the streaming video its become even more valuable. Add into that my literary desires and Amazon is getting a lot of my business.

So come holiday season 2011 are we going to have a whole new e-reader model? I sure hope so, especially since this will cause all the other companies to completely re-evaluate the way they are selling their products.