Is it the death of books as we know them?
Amazon introduced its new e-reader, the Kindle DX. It looks very similar to the Kindle 2, now being sold for $359, but the new has one has double the memory and the screen is 3 inches bigger. If put in your order for the new one today at $489, you’ll be one of the first in line to receive one sometime this summer.
Amazon has never released any sales figures for Kindles since it began selling them more than a year ago. You’ve got to wonder how many of these things are being sold, with consumer spending down so sharply recently.
Since Amazon isn’t saying how many Kindles it’s sold, estimates are all over the place — from 50,000 to a million.
If Amazon has sold 1 million Kindles, they haven’t done it on the planet I live on. I’ve never seen a Kindle, and never met a person in the flesh who even knows what a Kindle is, let alone bought one. Amazon has fewer than 100 million customers. So, to get to a million in sales, Amazon would need to have already sold one Kindle to one of every hundred customers. Not friggin likely, if you ask me.
But wait, there’s more: Amazon’s CEO claims that Kindle sales are already more than one-third of its book sales. I’m sorry, but there must be some ex-Enron employees cooking up those Kindle numbers.
I don’t know what Bezos is looking at, but one third does not jibe with the sales reports I see every month. All of the books I’ve written are available as paperbacks and Kindle eBook editions. I’ve made as much as $20,000 in one month from paperback sales. For those same books, the most I’ve made on Kindle sales in a month is $169. And I am betting that a good portion (perhaps most?) of that $169 in Kindle edition sales were to people using the free iPhone Kindle reader, not a the Kindle hardware itself.
Now, if Amazon wants to sell eBooks, all they need to do is start giving away Kindles, and telling people they can download all the eBooks they want for $10 or $15 a month.
Speaking of eBook readers, I saw the Sony Reader advertised in my local Target yesterday as a Mother’s Day gift idea. Now, that is rich!
http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fbookcycling-20%2F8010%2F5a436557-827f-4872-a7b0-b603f56f5592&Operation=GetDisplayTemplate
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3 Comments
In response, I can only say that:
* I have seen a Kindle
* I have met people who owned Kindles, and heard from many more I haven’t met “in the flesh”
* Everyone I’ve met or heard from who has a Kindle LOVES it–they absolutely RAVE about it
* I was among the earliest small publishers to Kindle my book, in December 2007. It consistently outsells the paperback edition on Amazon by a significant margin. In fact, my book appears to be rather popular among Kindle readers.
I have multiple e-book editions available or in production. I know programming, so it’s no big deal for me to set them up. Hence, upfront costs are nil, ongoing distribution costs are nil, and all I do is collect the money from sales. It’s hard to argue with effortless direct-deposits.
And, I do firmly believe that electronic delivery is where publishing is headed, and I’m exploiting every reasonable platform that I can.
Inanna Arthen, By Light Unseen Media
I have a Kindle and know numerous people (at least 10) with Kindles, both versions 1 and 2.
All the people that I know that have them including me LOVE them. My husband has begun hating when I read paper format books in bed because I need both hands to hold it and can’t cuddle and read at the same time. That’s love!
All the people I know that have a Kindle, including me, have bought and read MORE books on a monthly basis since getting the Kindle than they did beforehand.
I saw a quote today from Publisher’s Weekly that Amazon has said that for books that have Kindle versions on average 35% of the sales of that book are for Kindle.
Once there is a bit more competition, which I would bet is by this Xmas, you’ll see the cost of Kindles go down.
OK, I guess everyone I know is too cheap to buy a Kindle. Quite a coincidence.
I still want to know why my Kindle revenue is less than 1 percent, and Bezos says the average is 35 percent. If the 35 percent claim is accurate, and I’m getting 1 percent, then supposedly there’s another publisher who’s making 70 percent, right?
I have no doubt that people with a Kindle buy more books. But I really, really doubt they’re buying 35 percent of the total units on Amazon. I think it just defies common sense, even if you believe there’s a million Kindles out there.
Publishers say that eBook sales are 1 percent to 2 percent of the overall industry. That’s what I’m seeing.
I wonder if this is what’s really happening: For Amazon customers who own a Kindle, they buy 35 percent of their books in Kindle format. That, I could believe.
Just found an interesting article about the new decision process book buyers will face — should they buy a used book, or an eBook? Make sure to scroll down and take a look at the flowchart.