Why The Amazon Kindle Reader Is Dominating The Market
has proven itself to be the perfect product for Amazon. Considering that Amazon has such a strong association with both electronics and books the Kindle is a great fit for Amazon’s business model.
During the course of 2009, e-book readers in general, and especially the Kindle, were the cool “must have” personal electronics devices of the year. All the signs are that sales will continue to grow at an almost exponential rate throughout 2010. The market is still very new and is developing and changing at lightning speed.
Currently, the Kindle is way out in front. It currently enjoys an impressive 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 their own e-book readers in an attempt to get a piece of the action in what is anticipated to be a large and lucrative market.
In a way, it’s a back-handed compliment to Amazon that almost every new e-book reader that shows any promise is immediately named the “Kindle Killer”. However, bearing in mind that the Kindle is now Amazon’s best selling item, you can be certain that Amazon will fight hard to see off challengers for the top slot.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by reducing 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 more than 100 countries worldwide. In fact, 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.
In addition to enhancing 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 in excess of 400,000 titles available – and this number is growing at an average rate of over 500 a day.
So, whilst there are a lot of manufacturers scrambling to develop e-book readers in order to break into the market, Amazon is probably quietly confident. Rather than simply focusing on hardware development, Amazon is advancing on a broad front. They are developing the existing Kindle, tweaking prices, growing their market, expanding the choice of available books and generally capitalising on their dominant market position. Whenever they decide to launch the Kindle 4 – sometime this year in all probability – they will simply consolidate their leadership position even further.
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