has proven itself to be the perfect product for Amazon. Bearing in mind that Amazon has, in the perception of the buying public, a very strong link with both books and electronics the Kindle is a great fit for the Amazon business model.
During the course of 2009, e-book readers as a whole, and the Kindle in particular, were the cool “must have” personal electronics devices of the year. It looks like sales will continue to grow very rapidly throughout 2010. The market is still very new and is developing and changing at lightning speed.
At the moment, the Kindle is the leader of the pack. It currently has a 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market. Sony is in second place with a smaller but nonetheless creditable 35% market share. There is a long list of competing manufacturers who have now developed e-book readers of their own in an attempt to get a piece of the action in what is anticipated to be a large and profitable market.
It’s a compliment to Amazon, albeit a slightly back-handed one, that virtually every new e-book reader that shows any promise is immediately dubbed the “Kindle Killer”. However, bearing in mind that the Kindle is now Amazon’s number one selling item, you can be sure that Amazon will fight hard to hang on to the lead position.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by dropping the ticket price of the Kindle 2.0 from its $ 359 launch level to $ 259. The price of the Kindle DX remains, for the moment at least, unchanged. There have also been firmware updates, including the addition of pdf support and extended battery life, among others.
Amazon has also now released both the Kindle 2.0 and the DX in over 100 countries worldwide. In reality, Amazon could probably sell Kindles as fast as they can make them just in the USA – but developing a global Kindle presence is probably a very smart move in the long term.
Over and above tweaking the Kindle reader itself and expanding into new markets, Amazon continues to expand the choice of Kindle books available on its Kindle store. Right now there are more than 400,000 titles available – and this number is growing at an average rate of over 500 a day.
So, although there are a lot of manufacturers frantically developing e-book readers in order to break into the market, Amazon is probably quietly confident. Rather than just concentrating on the development of the hardware itself, Amazon is advancing on a broad front. They are improving the existing Kindle, tweaking prices, expanding their market, expanding the choice of books on offer and generally capitalising on their dominant market position. Whenever they decide to release the Kindle 4 – sometime this year in all probability – they are going to consolidate their leadership position even further.
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