How many Kindles has Amazon sold? Is Sony's Portable Reader still on track? We don't have a clue. Meanwhile
analysts and
industry experts crawl out of the woodwork providing their own sales estimates. The latest word has Evan Schnittman, Vice President at Oxford University Press, who sees, based on company data published on
Digitimes, "the success of Kindle and Reader dramatically expanding next year and growing by a factor of five."
Quote:
DIGITIMES, a daily news service covering the Taiwanese IT market, reported on April 18th, in a story entitled PVI EDP shipments to grow sharply in 2008, that PVI expects EPD module shipments to reach 120,000 units PER MONTH in the second half of 2008. It further explains that the unit price of the screens are $60-$70 per unit and that the current volume has been 60-80,000 units PER MONTH.
Also intriguing is the article’s claim that 60% of the EPD’s go to Amazon and 40% go to Sony. This is an important factor as it implies that there is a market beyond Kindle – a very, very strong market. Taking the figures at face value, Sony was selling (or at least manufacturing) an average of 28,000 readers per month (I took 70,000 units as the average sold per month and then 40% of that). Using this monthly rate, the annual sales of the Sony Reader are at nearly 350,000 units. Using the same formula, Amazon is ordering an average of 42,000 units per month, which will add up to over 500,000 units sold this year.[...]
With this in mind, I can easily imagine the success of Kindle and Reader dramatically expanding next year and growing by a factor of five. If that happens, then the formula above leads to a completely new ebook economy. Five million devices would mean ebook sales of $1,200,000,000, which, by my estimation, is 1.3% of the current global book market of $90,000,000,000.
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Related: PVI to double E Ink panel capacity,
120K E-Ink displays per month in 2H08
[via
TeleRead]