“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.