We we're all expecting to see huge sales for Kindles this season, especially from the new and highly touted Kindle Fire. Here's a press release for you:
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–(NASDAQ: AMZN) Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that this Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family and the popular Kindle Fire remained the bestselling product across all of Amazon since its introduction 8 weeks ago. The bestselling Kindle family – the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G and the $199 Kindle Fire – are available now at www.amazon.com/kindle and at over 16,000 retail locations throughout the United States.“This was a great Black Friday for Target and for Kindle Fire, which was the bestselling tablet in our stores on Black Friday,” said Nik Nayar, vice president merchandising, Target. “We’re excited so many guests chose Target as their destination for the new family of Kindle devices and we’re sure Kindle Fire will continue to be at the top of wish lists this holiday season.”“Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family and Kindle Fire was the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com.
Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family – customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday – and last year was a great year,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “In addition, we’re seeing a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles – one for themselves and others as gifts – we expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season.”
Four times as many kindle sales as last year and multiple devices per household!
I consider this monumental news for independent e-pubbers. I was sort of expecting to see sales perhaps not hit the stellar highs that were forcasted due to (some) poor reviews and public criticisms centered around how the Fire stacks up to the I-pad, that other super popular tablet.
Personally I thought these were unfair comparisons based on a number of points. First would be price point, they two devices may look very much alike but both are clearly marketed with a different end user in mind, Fire is clearly not designed as a PC replacement at any level, it's clearly designed as an advanced e-reader with web capability.
To me it's apples and oranges especially considering the next plateau for tablet PC's is to impart retina displays, an exceedingly high level of screen ddefinition that will enable technical professional use; for Dr's and pilots as an example. Conversely, no tablet, high priced or otherwise, has yet to deliver an effective e-ink display, which is what makes e-readers so much more enjoyable and desirable than say, your smart phone for reading!
As for an expanded picture of expected continued sales into Christmas and beyond: take a look at this report back in June from "All Things D" A WSJ web news site:
Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, a gawky novelty just three years ago, is now a big business getting bigger. Really big.
The big picture is that Mahaney thinks Kindle readers and books will generate $6.1 billion for Amazon next year–nearly 10 percent of its overall sales. Again, remember: This business didn’t exist until Thanksgiving 2007.
Full story here
All of this on top of news that traditional publishers are adopting more aggressive e-pub models, pay to e-pub services are sprouting up agencies are seeking out, contracting with e-pub services and vice versa.
Quick! Someone go over to Konrath's blog and tell him his tone sucks...or something else...not a lot else for anti-indie pundits to say regarding his long standing message and predictions.
Back to work...going to be a lot of new, future customers out there.
Good times.
Woo-hoo!
ReplyDeleteThat's what I said...really need to get my Novella up.
ReplyDeleteThis is good news!
ReplyDelete