Amazon Kindle Sales Still Holding Up
Despite the launch of the Apple iPad, Amazon’s kindle reader shows no signs of giving up the ghost just yet. Following the release of the third generation Kindle – the Kindle 3 – Amazon sold out of the readers (for what must be the umpteenth time now). Prospective customers currently face a three to four week wait before their new Kindles will be shipped to them. On the face of it, it looks like Amazon’s top selling product is still in demand.
The price of e-book readers has pretty much been in free fall of late. Amazon’s new Wi-Fi only entry level Kindle can be yours for just $139 – less than half of the original $359 Kindle launch price. It seems likely that e-book reader prices will fall further but, at this time, there’s probably enough of a difference between the price of the Kindle and the price of the entry level iPad to make the Kindle a good choice if you’re mainly interested in reading books as opposed to surfing the web, playing games or watching video.
Amazon, of course, are much more able to tolerate low hardware prices than many other e-book reader manufacturers. They can always make money from the ongoing sales of Kindle books over the life of the reader. Barnes and Noble could, theoretically at least, adopt a similar strategy – but they will probably be unable to achieve similar economies of scale to Amazon.
Pure hardware manufacturers are going to struggle to make a profit with e-book readers in the future. Plastic Logic have already cancelled their Que reader. It probably won’t be the last one to bite the dust either.
It could be that the e-book reader market place will become something of a two horse race. We might see the amazon kindle doing well at the lower end of the range where the main functionality desired is to read books and the iPad cleaning up in the more expensive mobile computer which is occasionally used to read e-books sector.
Is there any room in the middle for the likes of Sony, Asus and even Barnes and Noble? Probably not – but there’s still time for the game to change again.
