The Amazon Kindle - A Very Important Product

The first Amazon kindle ebook reader launched in November 2007. It sold out in five and a half hours and was then out of stock until April 2008. It’s probably reasonable to assume that even Amazon themselves were surprised (pleasantly) by the initial huge demand for the device.
 
The updated Amazon kindle 2 went on sale in late February of 2009 and it was widely believed to be a marked improvement on what was an already successful product. Included among a number of improvements were; improved battery life, faster page turning, a text-to-speech facility (it will read books to you) and space for around 1500 books in its onboard memory (albeit that the option to use a separate SD card, a design feature of the original kindle, was now removed).
 
Just three short months later, in mid May of 2009, Amazon announced that its kindle DX would be released in the summer of this year. The DX features most of the key features of the kindle 2 but has a larger 9.7″ display, which includes automatic rotation from portrait to landscape mode. Also featured, for the first time in the kindle range, is the ability to read native pdf files without the need for conversion.
 
The larger size of the kindle DX makes it ideally suited for reading magazines, newspapers and academic textbooks. A number of major newspapers announced - even before the DX went on sale - that they would offer discounted prices for the kindle to anyone signing up to annual subscriptions.
 
Amazon are playing their cards very close to their chest - but it’s thought that somewhere between $86 to $96 million of kindle reader sales were realised from November 2007 to August 2008. Remember, that’s only the reader device itslef - sales of ebooks should be considered separately. Industry insiders are predicting that kindle sales (again just the device) will reach $ 1.6 billion by 2012.
 
Good business for Amazon - and a significant move away from only marketing other manufacturer’s products to having their own product to bring to market. More importantly, whilst not exactly locked in, kindle customers will be heavily motivated to provide Amazon with a level of repeat business that most other vendors can only fantasise about.