Amazon seems to be bucking the downward trend with its sales increasing 18% to $6.7 billion in Q4 2008. For the full year, earnings rose 36% to $645 million and posted sales of $19.17 billion, an over 25% increase over the previous year. This is in part due to its sales of Kindle which topped 500,000 in 2008. With the Kindle 2 flipping a new page in eBook reader technology, Amazon expects to sell 1 million Kindles in 2009 generating $1.2 billion in Kindle related sales according to Citibank Research estimates. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has gone on a Kindle tour appearing on Charlie Rose, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and ABC News. The man that revolutionized the sale of books with the start of Amazon.com said, “Books are a 500-year-old technology…It’s had a really good run.”
Books in their current form are far from dead as people still crave their caffeine whilst being engrossed with the latest best-seller but the medium is evolving. Consider, the digitization project Google has undertaken with its Library Project or the proliferation of audiobooks; nothing like Tony Robbins to get you pumped up to take action. The Kindle 2 is far less clunky then lugging around a book, weighing in at 10.2 ounces and is only a 1/3 of an inch thick. You can download over 240,000 titles for $9.99 each in seconds. It`s a step up from your regular e-reader with the ability to search, make notes, surf the web, and let`s not forget its text-to-speech feature.
Get up close with Engadget’s Kindle 2 review or get excited watching Jon Rettinger unbox it here.
The announcement of Kindle 2 has not come without controversy. Paul Aiken , executive director of the Authors Guild says, “Everyone is worried that Amazon will end up becoming to books what Apple is to music.” Just as the popularity of the iPod gave Apple domination over the music industry the Kindle has the potential to have the same effect on books by locking readers into using the Kindle and the ability to impose price reductions on publishers of eBooks. Eventhough listening to a computerized voice reading the prose of Harry Potter cannot compete with the Grammy Award winning voice of Jim Dale, advances in voice simulation continue to make great strides. And although it’s much harder to rip a 300 page textbook than it is a 3:00 song from Kanye West, the book industry would do well by learning from some of the mistakes the music industry made early on by not embracing new technology and learning how to capitalize on it.
Personally, I’m still nostalgic for an old-fashioned book with its crisp pages, serifed fonts, and distinct smell. Now, if only I could find a comfortable position to read! But the Kindle and other eBook readers need not be the end of books as we know them.
In Amazon’s Q4 2008 earnings call Q&A session, Jeff Bezos said the following regarding the impact of Kindle on book sales:
“With Kindle sales, we see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle…And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books—Kindle books—for every physical book that they buy. So, so far what we’re seeing is very strong incremental book unit sales, which of course we’re very pleased to see. The biggest surprises so far for Kindle have just been the unusually strong demand that we saw in the fourth quarter. We had anticipated strong demand, and what we saw was stronger than that. So we are extremely grateful for that, and we will keep marching forward here.”
For the moment, it seems Amazon`s latest gadget has rekindled our love for reading.
