August 12, 2008
Amazon Mulls Jolly "Kris Kindle" Mascot
We don't have a shred of evidence for that headline; it's a gut thing. We're rollin' Jack Fuckin' Welch-style. But Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney does predict this will be a Kindle Christmas; he's doubled his sales estimates to nearly 400,000 units. At $359 per, that's over $136 million from a single product. Mahaney says Amazon's e-reader will bring in $1 billion by 2010. This projection is based on the Kindle selling as many units in its first year as the iPod. No one outside of Amazon knows how many that is--Mahaney is guesstimating, using in part the 4,000+ mostly positive Kindle reviews on Amazon's site, more than half of which give it 5 out of 5 stars. Our favorite contrarian response? Peter Kafka says hold on a sec: "iPod users immediately had access to thousands of songs they already owned the minute they synced their machines to their computers. And they could get anything else they wanted for free (if they chose to steal). Kindle users, however, are pretty much forced to pay $9.99 each time they want a new title."
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Here is Kafka's actual post from Monday. I agree--it seems like the Kindle is kind of neat and convenient, but I'm not sure it's $5-10 a book more convenient than free from the library.
Though maybe it would work well for me. I get 5-8 books a year from the library. I rarely have time to finish the book in the three weeks you're given, and there's almost always someone waiting for the books I have so I have to re-hold. I could budget pretty easily, say, $50-70 a year for books that I could read at my pace. Is that more convenient that the library? (Not counting the initial cost of course.) I should go through my library list and see how many books are actually available on the Kindle.
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@sevenless: thanks for the direct link! I'm a power library-user myself. For me, what might make it worthwile (but not at $359) is subscriptions to magazines and newspapers. Having all that at hand, without the recycling commitment, seems like a great deal.
On a slightly separate topic, I didn't want to write a separate post, but if were doing marketing at a newspaper, I'd start figuring out if bundling a 2-year subscription and a bulk Kindle buy would knock down the price enough to horn in on some of this Xmas shopping action. Not only would the newspaper subscriber get a Kindle, but it would actually come with something to read every day.
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Kafka also points out in his post comments that Citigroup is not an unconflicted source: they do investment banking for Amazon. Funny that isn't established in either of the business news articles I found.
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It seems to me that magazines and newspapers are the weakest aspect of the Kindle content-wise. Most people complain that there are few photographs or figures from the print versions. I suppose if you want the New Yorker or the Atlantic it might not matter. I see they have Analog and Asimov too--that might work too. Also I'm one of those crazy people who buys the Sunday paper mostly for the ads, so I'm not sure if it would be worth it for me. Maybe for the local news...I guess the subscriptions are pretty cheap, and they all have a free trial period.
Also for, what, ~$400 with tax and shipping can't Amazon throw in a code for even one free book?
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@sevenless: I thought they did get you started with some free books, but now that I look I don't see that. You do get 14-day trial subscriptions to mags and papers. But yeah, graphics are a drawback because for one thing it's b/w. I subscribe to the New Yorker, Atlantic, and Harper's, so for me, that would save some trips to the recycle bin. And I subscribe to the P-I, which I read in print and online. I think I could get used to reading it via Kindle. Don't know how I'd get my Fry's Electronics ads though. Good point.
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I'm lusting after one but really don't want to kick down the dollars. I read 2 or 3 books at a time and the convenience of having all 3 with me all the time with a minimum of effort sounds great. But I buy nearly all my books at Goodwill or a used book store, so there's no way I can justify spending $350 + $9.99 per book.
too bad, so sad...
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It's going to take a long time to get people out of paper mode and to relate it to the iPod is stupid.
They're two different pieces of entertainment with two completely different reasons and ways to process the fun.