I’m watching the Kindle for several reasons. First, I own one, I use it and I like it. Second, it’s an interesting new venture: a big, powerful company moving into a new but contiguous market. Third, it’s an interesting product category: the e-reader. I’ve been interested in that idea for years, but it hasn’t (until now, maybe) been successful. Ebooks and ebook readers make sense to me. But why had they all failed, at least until this one?
Interesting data from Tech Crunch last week in We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000:
The Kindle is such a small part of Amazon’s overall business that the company does not break out how many it’s sold. But we found out anyway: 240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source with direct knowledge of the numbers.
Doing a little back-of-the-envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in [more than] $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle adds $6 million in total revenues).
Peter Kafka at Silicon Valley Insider adds, in Amazon May Have Actually Sold a Bunch of Kindles:
That number is more or less in line with Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s estimates from May; Mark thinks the Kindle could be a $750 million business that accounts for 3 percent of Amazon’s sales by 2010. And by our thinking, it compares very nicely to Apple’s iPod introduction: Apple sold 376,000 units in the first year after introducing the MP3 player, in 2001. And the iPod, recall, didn’t require users to actually go out and purchase any music in order to use it–you could load up with music you already had bought, or had stolen. We’ve been skeptical about the Kindle’s prospects to date, but if these numbers prove out, we’ll be happy to reassess.
Interesting. So the Kindle makes it, while the ebook rocket, the Sony ebook reader and some other attempts didn’t. Were the others simply ahead of their time? Or maybe Amazon added a secret ingredient, like critical mass and market power? I’m not sure, and I don’t know that anybody can really be sure, but it’s bringing up some good questions to ask.
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As another blogger put it this morning, the KIndle is the Prius back in 2002 or so. Like you, I’m watching closely as well, not least because I’m pleased to have sold over 25,000 Kindle downloads of my books and articles these past 7 months.
Although the Kindle has been initially marketed as an “e-book reader,” its array of features actually set the bar considerably higher than any of its predecessor e-book devices. Electronic reading devices have been around for decades, but until the launch of the Kindle they failed to gain any serious traction.
Foremost among these features is the Kindle’s free broadband wireless connectivity (via the Sprint 3G EV-DO service), which has significant benefits for the device’s functionality both with e-books and with other content. Such a data connection ordinarily costs over $50 per month, but Amazon pays the entire bill (whatever it is) and uses the connection to run a “Whispernet” service that allows Kindle owners to download content – books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs – within seconds of purchasing it from the Kindle store.
In addition to this wireless connectivity and nearly instantaneous content delivery, of course, the Kindle’s viability as a reading device owes a great deal to the fact that it is manufactured and sold by Amazon. Over the 13 years prior to its launch of the Kindle, Amazon built enormous brand power among book buyers and book publishers, with over 40 million regular visitors (most of whom still think of Amazon as a bookseller despite its relentlessly expanding product mix), a catalog of over 4 million book titles, and business relationships with thousands of publishers and authors.
Cheers,
Windwalker