“Ahh the Oprah effect. Consider that the talk show world’s version of King Midas recently featured the electronic book reader from Amazon.com dubbed Kindle on her show, hailing it as the greatest thing she’s ever seen, and even had Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on to tout Kindle’s virtues,” Jim Goldman reports for CNBC.
“It’s one thing to have Oprah praise something; but sales can go stratospheric when she gushes like this,” Goldman reports. “She gushed. And these sales since have been other-worldly.”
MacDailyNews Take: We couldn’t find any hard sales numbers for Amazon’s Kindle in Goldman’s article or, for that matter, anywhere else. It all seems to be a big secret. So, we contacted Mr. Goldman and asked:
Do you have any real unit sales figures for Kindle?
It seems to be a big secret.
To us, it seems quite easy to “sell out” of something if you don’t make very many to begin with – especially if you have Oprah sending her audience in concentrated quest of a device that really might not exist in meaningful quantities.
Please let us know if you can find hard units sales numbers.
Mr. Goldman promptly responded via email that according to his sources, Kindle will sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 425,000 units this holiday quarter (790K units total for 2008).
In his article Goldman continues, “Amazon now finds itself in the rarified air of Nintendo’s Wii. The Kindle has supplanted Apple’s iPod and iPhone, the Ferbie (do they still make those?) and just about everything else as this year’s must-have gadget under the tree.”
MacDailyNews Take: Whoa, there, Jim! Tens of millions of iPhones and iPods will be sold this holiday season. Versus 425K Kindles (which, as we’ve written before, looks like something John Dykstra superglued together back in 1975). Let’s look the numbers: Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster estimates 18.5 – 19 million iPods + 6.4 million iPhones. That’s 24.9-25.4 million devices or an average of 11,759 iPod/iPhone units per hour. In other words, this quarter, Apple will outsell Amazon’s total quarterly Kindle unit sales in just over 36 hours!
While we still highly recommend Jim Goldman’s work, in this case he’s obviously fallen victim to “the Oprah effect” himself. We simply cannot fathom how Goldman could write “The Kindle has supplanted Apple’s iPod and iPhone… and just about everything else as this year’s must-have gadget under the tree” with a straight face.
Maybe Jim was joking and we missed it?
Goldman regains his footing a bit and continues, “You’d think after the sell-out last year that Amazon would’ve gotten wise to its supply constraints and done something about the problem so it wouldn’t leave customers out in the cold again.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: On October 02, 2008, Andy Greenberg and James Erik Abels reported for Forbes, “It’s official: The iPhone is more popular than Amazon.com’s Kindle. And not just in the obvious categories like listening to music, browsing the Web or the other applications where Kindle barely competes. Now, the iPhone is also muscling into Amazon’s home turf: reading books… Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple’s iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day.”
In their article, Greenberg and Abels didn’t even mention the sales of eReader, another popular free digital book reader for iPhone and iPod touch, or other digital book reader apps that are available via Apple’s App Store.
The kindle blows chunks. i’d rather drag my penis across the glass face of a Blackberry Storm.
Amazon is selling its own Kindle on its own web site. While I am quite confident that Amazon’s best selling charts reflect actual numbers for all products, I will make an exception for Kindle. I am convinced that Amazon artifically puts that Kindle on their best-selling charts. Obviously, it would be quite embarrassing if the Kindle were nowhere to be seen on their top-100 list in any of the categories (except, perhaps, electronic book reader hardware, where it would probably make top-10, out of about 15 products on the market).
I would like to see a Kindle app for the iPhone/touch that would allow the purchase and reading of the Kindle library.
I DO NOT need another device to carry around.
I am sure if someone typed it, it must be true. Yep, the clueless do have keyboards. It is hard to undo a posting.
Don’t care a whit about what Jim Goldman believes about the Kindle. Oprah’s influence notwithstanding . . . NOBODY READS. Period. EVERYONE LISTENS TO MUSIC AND WATCHES MOVIES/TV. Period. Do the math.
MDN wrote: [Kindle] looks like something John Dykstra superglued together back in 1975…
Now *that* was funny… thanx.
MaWo: ‘force’. As in, ‘May it be with you.’
Kendall:
The kindle blows chunks. i’d rather drag my penis across the glass face of a Blackberry Storm.
Tact aside, I can tell you don’t mean what you say, by the very fact that Ken Dolls don’t have a penis.
Goldman has been in Oprah’s crack again. Like going down a dark mineshaft!
Kendall’s remark was the funniest I have read in quite some time. Thank you!
I wonder what Oprah charges.
don’t forget that Stanza just this week added support for licensed eReader content from Fictionwise – that’s another 40,000 titles available on the iPhone, directly within Stanza.
http://tinyurl.com/5awtyq
I’ve used a Kindle and generally like the concept of an ebook – but I agree with the Dykstra comment. they really need to come out with v2.0 (hopefully using some proper industrial engineers this time) Meanwhile Stanza on my iPhone is looking better and better… plus it fits in my pocket.
Actually reading is probably up, what with everyone on computers all the time. Who has time for movies these days? How many people sit and listen to a 45 minute album anymore, without doing other things at the same time?
will sell – WILL SELL = estimated. It all depends on the rogue marketing guys viewpoint. ‘Will sell’ can be based on averaging actual sales + growth, or what a company in its own mind wants to sell, regardless of facts pointing otherwise. Unless someone, somewhere has actual Kindles sales numbers to make predictions – it’s all bs. Oprah is definitely bs, she’s a businesswoman, her goal isn’t womens issues – it’s money. Anytime your audience blindly follows your lead – that only benefits YOU – not them. Jim Goldman, Bezos and the rest of the businesspeople, they know it’s all business, but I feel sorry for the women who believe that being part of Oprah’s ‘target market’ is somehow empowering all women everywhere.
@Randian
Don’t care a whit about what Jim Goldman believes about the Kindle. Oprah’s influence notwithstanding . . . NOBODY READS. Period. EVERYONE LISTENS TO MUSIC AND WATCHES MOVIES/TV. Period. Do the math.
So, who’s reading this website?
Classics beats Kindle — check it out at
http://classicsapp.com/
I’ve got a Kindle and enjoy it. So far, I’ve downloaded 34 books and have finished all but 3. I subscribe to 2 periodicals and have read several issues of each. I’ll be ordering more books; I read a lot.
The Kindle is far from a perfect medium for some types of books. It’s black & white only. It’s pretty bad for images and tables. But most books are primarily text, and it does a satisfactory job of displaying text that’s highly readable and with a large enough screen to display a number of lines of text per page. Battery life is very good.
What “makes” the Kindle for me is the very large repertoire of books available for it, and the convenience and speed of download of books directly to the Kindle. Think of Amazon’s Kindle bookstore as similar to Apple’s iTunes, but with a large selection of reading material rather than audio and video material.
I’m very much a Mac person. I do my work on Macs. I’ve got an iPhone 3G and iPods.
Could Apple blow the Kindle and Amazon Kindle bookstore out of the water, were they to enter the eBook market with a very large selection of current books for download to an Apple device? Of course! I would expect Apple’s attention to ergonomics, detail and user satisfaction would be as revolutionary in this market as it has been in the computer, music, video and mobile phone markets. I would switch in a heartbeat if Apple enters this market, and I hope they do.
But they haven’t entered that market yet. The screens of the iPhone and the iPod Touch are too small for serious reading. MacBooks (including the Air) are too big and heavy.
Something like the often-rumored but so far elusive small and light Mac tablet, in conjunction with a comprehensive downloadable bookstore added to iTunes would finally make ebooks a pleasurable experience for a variety of media, not only print but images, video and audio. Of course, I would also want that device to be a small and light Mac OS X computer capable of running my favorite OS X applications and interfacing with my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Perhaps an 8, 9 or 10-inch screen, total weight perhaps 1.5 pounds or less.
One of these days!
wow… i have to agree with “Reality Check” on this one. Though, I may be biased by the fact I work for an Amazon company and my stock has tanked from 80+ to the mid 40’s and desperately would love to see it rebound. If the Kindle can spark that flame (bad pun, sorry), then I am behind it. People can have their iPod, iPhone, and Kindle.
With all that said… would be nice if Amazon would release the Kindle App for iPhone. It would make decent sense as there are millions of iPhones and Touches out there to potentially buy and install the app. People would be more willing to pay 20 bucks for the Kindle app then several hundred for the hardware Kindle device, and software once developed has very little cost associated with it… and limited warranty support needed vs hardware.
Just this Dudes .02¢ (but again, I am biased slightly)
The Dude abides.
Oprah has an RDF?
I’m sure the Kindle is doing great, even if it’s fugly. They have over 9000 reviews of the thing at Amazon. That’s a pretty good indicator that while bookreading is a niche, it’s a fanatical niche. Something Mac-users should understand and appreciate. Let the Kindlists burn their paper books in a bonfire.
$369 plus you pay for books? No games, no music, no movies, no GPS. Who’s buying this thing other than the pretentious and those too stupid to figure out any other kind of device.
Until Apple can make the iPhone battery last all week and the FAA let’s us keep our electronics turned on during takeoff and landing, I expect I’ll be hauling a bit of dead tree around with me, so what good is a Kindle?
I don’t see the point of the Kindle.
Because of the black and white screen and the size it displays it is not a very good platform for periodicals. There are many classes of books the screen is also not good for.
The kindle is best for reading plain text ficton and non-fiction titles and there is already a much superior format for reading those kinds of things–they’re called books. Easier on the eyes than the Kindle, portable (many fit right in a pants pocket!), batteries never run down, can be given to or traded with friends, and unlike any digital format so far they remain fully accessible and readable fifty or more years later.
I would love to have a device like the Kindle that could replace periodicals–roughly magazine sized, thin and light, with a color screen. Between magazines, journals, newspapers and, yes, comics, I spend easilly $200-$300 a month and have shelves full of old perodicals (anyone need an American Record Guide from 1971, an old Stereo Review with Sibelius on the cover, etc?).
A device that could be used for reading periodicals as paper-printed would be wonderful, particularly if it used a file format that would be supported long term.
Carrying around another chuck of plastic to scroll through Ender’s Game a couple of paragraphs at a time? No. thanks, that’s too much trouble, even for Mormon child pseudo-porn.
@Randian
I read, voraciously. I don’t own an iPod, or an iPhone, or a Kindle (heaven forfend!). Reading on a computer screen kills my eyes. So I’ll take a real printed-on-paper book or magazine every time. Be careful of generalizations; they are dangerous.
@Randian…
You mean, no one reads ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’ or ‘Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal’ anymore??
Curious… I’m about halfway through ‘Atlas Shrugged’ atm… reading it for the third time.
Silly Objectivists.
Oprah gushing over Kindle? I could of sworn she’d already gone though menopause.
@The Dude…
Bill & Ted (Ted “Theodore” Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esq.) called and they said that they want their slang back.
Oh, and they also said, ‘It’s time to get a job and get out of your mothers basement.’
@ BillD:
I like your hardware idea. A netbook size package, with a touch screen that swivels and folds back on top of the keyboard, running a lightweight iPhone version of OS X that also leverage Apple’s Inkwell technology. It’s Kindle meets netbook meets iPod Touch meets Tablet Mac. (But if this uber-gizmo became a reality, what would the rumor mill talk about before every Macworld?)
The main question: could Jobs & Co. outdo Amazon on securing downloadable content? If getting the distribution rights to enough titles were possible, the “MacKindle” would allow Apple to extend their media delivery business into books and magazines.
Hey — they already own the trademark on “MacBook” too…
@ Famous Grouse
You’d have to turn your Kindle off during takeoff & landings as well, not just your iPhone.
My mother-in-law just loves her Kindle. I was less than impressed. I didn’t think the screen was that good, and I was surprised that she liked it as well as she did because it seemed a bit difficult to read (the text is not very crisp and the contrast not so good). No thanks, but it obviously serves a market for some people.
That’s why different companies make different things. It makes sense for Amazon to make an eBook reader, but not for Apple.