The first Amazon kindle ebook reader launched in November 2007. It sold out in less than six hours and remained out of stock until April 2008. It’s probably reasonable to suppose that even Amazon was somewhat taken aback by the immediate success of the device.
 
The updated Amazon kindle 2 went on sale in late February of 2009 and it was widely believed to be a marked improvement on what was an already successful product. Among other improvements it sported an increased battery life, quicker page turns, a text-to-speech facility (it reads books to you) and space for around 1500 books in its internal memory (even if the option to use an external SD card, a feature of the first kindle, was no longer available).
 
Just three months later, in May 2009, Amazon announced that its kindle DX would be launching in the summer of this year. The DX includes most of the main features of the kindle 2 but sports a larger 9.7″ display, which features automatic rotation between portrait and landscape mode. Also included, for the first time in the kindle range, is the ability to handle native pdf files without the need for translation.
 
The extra size of the kindle DX makes it well suited for reading newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. Quite a few major newspapers announced that they would offer the Kindle device at a discount to anyone signing up to an annual subscription.
 
Amazon have not released official figures - but it’s believed that something between $86 to $96 million of kindle reader sales were generated between November 2007 and August 2008. Don’t forget, that’s only for the reader itself - the sales of ebooks must be separately considered. Industry watchers are predicting that sales for the kindle (the reader device only) will reach $ 1.6 billion by 2012.
 
Great business for Amazon - and an important move away from just selling other manufacturer’s products to having their own product to bring to the market. Just as important is the fact that, whilst not actually tied in, Kindlers will be inclined to provide Amazon with the type of repeat sales that the majority of other merchants could only dream of.

Technorati Tags: Amazon kindle, e-book reader, kindle 2, kindle DX, kindle ebook reader

Tags: Amazon kindle, e-book reader, kindle 2, kindle DX, kindle ebook reader

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.