Amazon’s Kindle book reader product for Amazon. Considering that Amazon has, in the perception of the buying public, a very strong link with both electronics and books the Kindle fits in really well with the Amazon business model.
During the course of 2009, e-book readers as a whole, and especially the Kindle, became the cool “must have” personal electronics devices of the year. It’s predicted that sales will continue to grow at a very rapid rate throughout 2010. The market is still in its infancy and is changing and developing rapidly.
At the moment, the Kindle is the leader of the pack. It currently enjoys an impressive 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market. Sony takes the second place position with a smaller but nonetheless creditable 35% market share. There are a whole host of competing manufacturers who have now developed their own e-book readers in order to get a slice of the pie in what looks like being a large and profitable market.
In a way, it’s a back-handed compliment to Amazon that virtually every new e-book reader that shows any promise is immediately given the title of the “Kindle Killer”. However, bearing in mind that the Kindle is now Amazon’s best selling item, you can be sure that Amazon will be fighting tooth and nail to see off challengers for the top slot.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by reducing the price of the Kindle 2.0 by $ 100 from its February launch price to $ 259. The price of the Kindle DX remains, for the moment at least, unchanged. There have also been firmware updates, including prolonged battery life and the addition of pdf support for the Kindle 2.0, among others.
Amazon has also now released both the Kindle 2.0 and the DX in more than 100 countries worldwide. In fact, Amazon could probably sell Kindles in the States as fast as it could manufacture them – but developing a global Kindle presence is a wise long term strategy for Amazon.
In addition to enhancing the Kindle reader itself and expanding into new markets, Amazon continues to increase the selection of Kindle books available on its Kindle store. There are currently more than 400,000 titles available – and this number is growing at an average rate of 500 each and every day.
So, although there are a huge number of manufacturers scrambling to develop e-book readers in order to grab a share of the market, Amazon is probably quietly confident. Rather than simply focusing on hardware development, Amazon is making improvements in a number of different areas. They are updating the existing Kindle, tweaking prices, growing their market, expanding the choice of books on offer and generally capitalising on their dominant market position. Whenever they decide to release the Kindle 4 – sometime this year in all probability – they are going to consolidate their leadership position even more.