Will This Festive Season See The Latest Third Generation Kindle Set More Sales Records?
The Christmas sales season is a very important time for any retailer. As much as 40% of yearly sales can be achieved in the weeks preceding Christmas. For Amazon, the 2009 Christmas period was an extremely important period, for a variety of reasons over and above the normal sales surge.
The Kindle 2.0 reader, which launched in February of 2009, and which had already proven to be a hugely successful product for Amazon, became the online retail giant’s most gifted, most wished for product ever and – most important of all – Amazon’s number one selling item. It has been Amazon’s best selling item since then.
On Christmas day of 2009, Amazon sold more Kindle books than physical books for the first time ever. Almost certainly, this would have been heavily influenced by those lucky people who got a Kindle for Christmas testing their Kindles by logging on and downloading one or two Kindle books. A lot of these were probably free Kindle books (there are 1.8 million of these to choose from).
Even so, it was still an important milestone for Amazon and a sign of things to come. At the moment, Amazon regularly sells more Kindle books than traditional hardback books – by a factor of 1.8 to 1. It seems probable that it will only be a matter of time before Kindle books are outselling paperbacks as well.
In the autumn of 2010, Amazon launched their updated Kindle 3 reader. There were a variety of technical improvements – including extra memory (enough space for 3,500 Kindle books), an improved e-ink technology screen with better contrast and a smaller and lighter casing. The new, entry level Kindle – which can be yours for just $ 139 – was also revealed. The Wi-Fi plus 3G model is still available at $ 189 – still significantly lower than the $ 359 launch price of the Kindle 2.0.
With a $ 139 entry level price the Kindle is pretty close to being an impulse buy for many. You might expect to pay a fair bit more for something like a mid level mp3 player or a mobile phone!
Despite the appearance of Apple’s iPad on the scene, the Kindle 3 became the fastest selling Kindle ever. Amazon, almost inevitably, sold out of their readers and customers faced a wait – of up to five weeks at one point – before their reader could be delivered.
The Kindle was already the top selling e-book reader. The improved Kindle 3 widened the gap between Amazon’s reader and the rest of the pack even further. The very fact that main competition to the Kindle comes in the shape of a tablet computer which costs over three times as much as the Kindle speaks volumes.
All things considered, Amazon must be anticipating another set of record breaking sales for their latest Kindle reader. It will be interesting to see if (when) Kindle stocks run out once again in the run up to Christmas. Customers are limited to a maximum of three Kindles each right now – a clear indication of Amazon’s confidence in their number one reader. It looks like being another Kindle Christmas in 2010.
