When the first Kindle came out, many experts claimed that it will never be successful. Some claimed that no one would pay $360 just to read books. Fast forward to 2009, and Amazon has already sold 300,000 Kindle 2.0 units. That is great news for Amazon. The first generation Kindle sold about 500,000 units in its lifespan. Kindle 2.0 is threatening to top that in less than 6 months. And we need to take into the account the negative effect of the recession in the U.S. and millions of people being unemployed.
This is great news not only for Amazon but also for the green movement. Green technologies are often considered pricey and overrated. Kindle may be a bit expensive, but it’s certainly underrated, if anything. Nevertheless, if you can sell a $360 device this well in these tough times, there should be hope for other green products as well. On the flip side, Amazon has not really positioned Kindle as a green gadget. We certainly haven’t seen too many Kindle ads pointing out this issue. So the jury is still out on whether people are buying Kindle to save the environment or just save money.
Amazon selling 1 million Kindle units this year would be a crushing news for other e-book makers in the market. They can take heart from the fact that the e-book market is growing, but will they be able to put up a good challenge against Amazon Kindle? Companies have been trying to kill the iPod for years but to no avail. Can we see the same pattern of events manifest with Amazon Kindle? Time will certainly tell.
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0 comments
#1CameronApril 17, 2009, 8:29 am
I have seen far more Kindle 2′s in the wild compared to the Kindle 1.
Now if only i could afford to upgrade
#2BrianApril 18, 2009, 4:19 pm
I’ve been tempted to upgrade, as well, but I don’t see the cost/benefit ratio working out for me. The new Kindle doesn’t bring enough to the table, as compared to the old one. (The fact that it doesn’t have expandable memory doesn’t help, either.)
I might jump to the next version of the Kindle, though. The kind of things I’d be looking for in an upgrade would be:
1) Color screen
2) Trackball (rather than the 5-way joystick of the Kindle 2, or the scrollwheel of my current Kindle).
3) Significantly more memory.
4) A development platform and/or apps that would make the Kindle more useful outside of books.
5) A better keyboard.
6) Wifi as an option, so that I could read books stored on my computer w/o downloading them.
7) More native format compatibility (specifically, PDF, Word, and HTML). It’s fine to be able to convert documents, but it would be better to have them read natively.
I don’t care about a touchscreen until someone can make one where the display doesn’t suffer (as apparently the Sony Readers do) from less-readable text. I really think that the Kindle could be the basis of the next generation of portable computing, if Amazon could get it right.
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