Latest Amazon Kindle – Revolutionising Reading
The original Amazon kindle ebook reader launched in November 2007. It sold out in under six hours and remained out of stock up to April 2008. It’s probably fair to say that even Amazon was surprised by the instant success of the device.
The updated kindle 2 was released in late February of 2009 and it was widely believed to be a significant improvement on what was an already successful product. Among other upgrades it boasted an improved battery life, faster page turns, a text-to-speech facility (it reads books to you) and enough storage for roughly 1500 books in its internal memory (albeit that the facility to use an external SD card, a feature of the original kindle, was no longer available).
Just 3 months later, in May of 2009, Amazon announced that its kindle DX would be launching in the summer of this year. The DX features the majority of the principle features of the kindle 2 but has a larger 9.7” display, which incorporates automatic rotation between portrait and landscape views. Also featured, for the first time in the kindle range, is the ability to display native pdf files without the necessity for conversion.
The added size of the kindle DX makes it ideally suited for viewing newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. A number of major newspapers announced – even before the DX went on sale – that they would offer reduced prices for the kindle for signing up to yearly subscriptions.
Amazon are keeping their cards very close to their chest – but it’s estimated that in the region of between $86 to $96 million of kindle reader sales were made between November 2007 and August 2008. Don’t forget, that’s just the electronic device – the sales of electronic books need to be considered separately. Industry insiders are predicting that kindle sales (again just the device) will reach $ 1.6 billion by 2012.
Good business for Amazon – and an important move away from only marketing other supplier’s products to having their own product to bring to market. More importantly though, whilst not exactly tied in, kindle customers will be heavily motivated to provide Amazon with a level of repeat sales that other online shopping websites can only dream of.
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