Yesterday Amazon said that sales of eBooks for Kindle beat sales of hardcover books on Amazon.com. This is not saying that e-books outsold printed books, nor does it look at the industry as a whole. But it’s a significant milestone that shows the e-reading market is here to stay:
Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
In addition Amazon announced that the lower price of the Kindle had accelerated sales:
Today, Amazon.com announced that Kindle device unit sales accelerated each month in the second quarter–both on a sequential month-over-month basis and on a year-over-year basis.
“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com.
Indeed, the reason that the iPad hasn’t killed Kindle is because the price has now crossed the $200 barrier and because many people want a light-weight dedicated e-reader. However it’s quite an “anemic” device by comparison; I was playing with one again at a Target store last night.
The dilemma now for Amazon is whether to pursue its plan to upgrade the Kindle into a more full-featured tablet with a developer ecosystem. Some upgrades are warranted and perhaps an apps ecosystem for the device is sustainable. But these sales figures show that Kindle might do best if it stays put.
July 20th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Anemic it may be, but the Kindle excels at hours and hours of reading books. I regularly get a month of battery life, reading for a couple of hours a day. For this single use case, it beats the iPad hands-down.
Outside of the US, the wireless, subsidised by an a extra $ or two on the price of a book, works only for books and newspapers, not for reading screenwerk or other blogs. That also means that it’s not possible to tweet or send a FB update about the book you are reading, which is a pity, and would still fit into the reading use case (vaguely). It does mean I’m quite happy to pay the few cents a day I need to get a fat newspaper in my inbox where I happen to be.
I don’t own an iPad (yet). I can see how it would fit into the place my lone iPod Touch currently holds for browsing the web and reading email on wifi, and for playing games. However, for those of us wishing to read, the Kindle is still king.
July 20th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Robin:
Agree that it has a longer battery life and is lighter. For this single use case it’s mostly superior. I don’t prefer the e-ink presentation of text. Over time Kindle will ad features and have a devoted following among avid readers — and perhaps others if the price goes down further.
But if I have to choose devices it’s got to be the iPad, which offers Kindle software.
July 22nd, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Greg: Ironically after writing the above comment (on an iPhone) while on holiday in Portugal, my son maxed out my iPhone roaming data subscription by watching YouTube, so I found myself offline for a couple of days. I was reading my Kindle when I noticed a way of sharing highlighted text with Facebook and Twitter, apparently released in the v2.5 update around May. After Oauth worked fine, I found that the rest of Twitter also worked — and the rest of the web. Unannounced, it seems that Amazon is opening up their 3G network country by country. http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/p/listing-of-countries-possibly-getting.html says that they’ve received reports (like mine) of users being able to browse from “Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Thailand, Scotland, and the UK so far.” Amazon.com so far continues to state that the browser doesn’t work internationally.
I understand your choice of the iPad. When I travel light, I read Kindle books on my iPhone. I’m not sure whether it’s evidence of a true Kindle platform, i.e. Kindle apps on phones, PCs and Macs, or evidence that the Kindle Development Kit isn’t enough to support a real app ecosystem a la Apple. The KDK also says that all active content may not be a generic reader, although I dare say that if Apple approached them to allow iBooks to be shown, and agreed to cover the $0.15 / MB for downloads, they’d be fine.
July 30th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
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