Amazon’s Kindle book reader product for Amazon. Considering that Amazon has such a strong association with both electronics and books the Kindle is a great fit for the Amazon business model.
During the course of 2009, e-book readers in general, and especially the Kindle, became the cool “must have” gadgets of the year. It’s predicted that sales will keep growing at a very rapid rate throughout 2010. The market is still in its infancy and is changing and developing at lightning speed.
Currently, the Kindle is way ahead of the chasing 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 are a whole host of competing manufacturers who have now developed their own e-book readers 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 displays and potential is immediately hailed as the “Kindle Killer”. However, considering the fact that the Kindle is now Amazon’s top selling product, you can be sure that Amazon will be fighting tooth and nail to see off challengers for the top slot.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by cutting the ticket price of the Kindle 2.0 by $ 100 from its February launch price 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 establishing an international Kindle presence is probably a very smart move in the long term.
Over and above developing the Kindle reader itself and expanding into new markets, Amazon continues to add to the library of Kindle books available on its website. Right now there are over 400,000 titles available – and this number is increasing at an average rate of over 500 a day.
So, even although there are a lot of manufacturers scrambling to develop e-book readers in order to grab a share of the market, Amazon probably has good reason to feel quietly confident. Rather than just concentrating on the development of the hardware itself, Amazon is making improvements in a number of different areas. They are improving the existing Kindle, tweaking prices, growing their market, increasing the selection of books on offer and generally capitalising on their market leadership position. Whenever they decide to release the Kindle 4 – expect to see it sometime in 2010 – they are going to consolidate their leadership position even further.