Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos confirmed that the online retailer sells its Kindle e-reader "at cost," with profit coming instead from sales of online content.
Bezos' remarks, in an interview Thursday with the BBC, marked the first time the company had confirmed long-held Wall Street assumptions that it did not make a profit on sales of the popular tablet.
The aggressive pricing furthers Bezos' goal of getting Kindle tablets into the hands of as many buyers of Amazon's online content -- from games and books to video -- as possible.
Apple, by contrast, makes much of its profit from hardware sales. It sells a single-sized iPad at costs ranging from $399 to $829, depending on storage capacity, screen resolution and wireless connectivity.
(Reporting by Michelle Conlin; Editing by Ken Wills)
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