Widespread Acceptance Of E-Books Thanks To The Amazon Kindle
Amazon has a very strong link with books and reading, so it’s no big surprise that the Kindle reader has turned out to be such a perfect fit for the Amazon business model. During 2009 e-book readers really went mainstream, and a great deal of the credit for that must go to the Amazon Kindle. Both the Kindle 2 and the larger DX model generated a huge amount of publicity and really helped to bring e-books into the mainstream consumer marketplace.
Right now, the Kindle is Amazon’s best selling product. It enjoys a 60% share of the US e-book reader market – Sony are in second place with around 35% of the market. Both the Kindle 2 and DX models are now being sold in more than 100 countries around the world. There is a wide variety of new readers available on the market just now – from a number of different manufacturers. However, the Amazon Kindle is undoubtedly the current market leader.
It seems that almost every new reader that shows any potential at all is immediately dubbed the “Kindle Killer”. In a way, this is just serves to underline the fact that the Kindle is the benchmark for the industry at this time. Amazon’s response to the increased level of competition has been to drop the price of the Kindle 2 from the original launch price of $359 to $259. Currently, no adjustment has been made to the price of the Kindle DX. However, the recent launch of Apple’s iPad may mean that Amazon needs to consider a price drop for the Kindle DX sometime in the near future.
As well as developing the Kindle hardware and growing the size of its potential market, Amazon has continued to ensure that Kindle users have a good choice of Kindle books available for reading on their Kindles. At the time of writing there are more than 420,000 Kindle books available on the Amazon site – a number of which is growing at an average rate of 500 new titles each and every day.
Whereas Amazon’s competitors are focusing strongly on the development of the hardware side of the e-book reader market, Amazon are making progress in a number of different areas. They are making price adjustments, producing firmware updates for the existing Kindle models, expanding the size of their market and continually increasing the number of Kindle books available for their customers to choose from. In short, they are taking full advantage of their market domination and also profiting from their very strong link to both books and reading.
So far Amazon have pretty much defined the e-book reader market. It will therefore be very interesting to see what features they decide to incorporate in the next version of the Kindle reader. This will give us all a good idea of the way that the e-book reader market is heading in future. There is no agreement amongst industry watchers as to when we can expect the next Kindle to appear. However, remembering the fact that the Kindle 2 is now just over 12 months old, it seems reasonable to assume that we will see a new, updated Kindle in 2010.
Find out about the Amazon Kindle for yourself – and have a look at the wide range of Kindle accessories available to let you personalise and protect your reader.