Despite the popularity of the Amazon Kindle, Amazon has never provided any figures on how the item is actually selling. The most detailed bit of information they did provide was that “More new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch. And Amazon customers are now ordering more Kindles than anything else in the store.”
Analyst Douglas Anmuth estimates Amazon will sell about five million Kindles this year due to its more appealing prices and redesign. And Amazon offering apps for all major mobile and OS platforms means that the Kindle store has a good chance of being the top seller of eBooks, which is their bigger goal, we gather.
Believing that there is a market for cheaper, dedicated electronic readers and more expensive multifunction devices such as tablets is certainly a viable one. I have a smartphone. It does a lot. But I still bought a Kindle. And I have yet to get a tablet. But the differences between the three: smartphone, tablet, electronic reader is a topic for another article.
Back to Amazon and the Kindle, Amazon sells the Kindle and Kindle books in over 150 countries, and its cellular based Whispernet service in over a hundred of those. The new Kindle supports wi-fi, which means the Kindle becomes useful even without the 3G. It’s competitors have limited presence outside the U.S. Amazon has the distribution and power to make an international electronic bookstore work.
What the Kindle doesn’t offer, but could, and hopefully will, is support for the popular EPUB format, as well as library book support. But, ultimately, it is still the best combination of value and features in the market.
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- Amazon Will Sell 5 Million Kindles (Kindlen?) This Year (crunchgear.com)
