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 Amazon’s business model.
During the course of 2009, e-book readers as a whole, and the Kindle in particular, were the hot “must have” gadgets of the year. It’s predicted that sales will continue to grow at a very rapid rate throughout 2010. The market is still very new and is developing and changing at lightning speed.
At the moment, the Kindle is the market leader by a long way. It currently has a 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market. Sony takes the second place position 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 looks like being a large and lucrative market.
It’s a compliment to Amazon, albeit a slightly back-handed one, that practically every new e-book reader that shows any promise is instantly dubbed the “Kindle Killer”. However, bearing in mind that the Kindle is now Amazon’s number one selling product, you can be certain that Amazon will fight hard to hang on to the lead position.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by reducing the ticket price of the Kindle 2.0 by $ 100 from its February launch price to $ 259. The price of the Kindle DX, which probably has a little less competition just at the moment, remains unchanged. There have also been firmware updates, including prolonged battery life and the addition of pdf support for the Kindle 2.0, among others.
Amazon has also now released both the Kindle 2.0 and the DX in over 100 countries worldwide. In truth, Amazon could probably sell Kindles as fast as they can make them just in the USA – but developing an international Kindle presence is a wise long term strategy for Amazon.
Over and above tweaking the Kindle reader itself and entering new markets, Amazon continues to expand the library of Kindle books available on its Kindle store. There are currently over 400,000 titles available – and this number is growing at an average rate of 500 each and every day.
So, even although there are a huge number 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 simply focusing on hardware development, Amazon is making improvements in a number of different areas. They are developing the existing Kindle, tweaking prices, expanding their market, expanding the choice of available books and generally capitalising on their dominant market position. Whenever they decide to release the Kindle 4 – during the course of 2010 most likely – they will simply consolidate their leadership position even further.
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