Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
Dahak,
Actually, I found a link the first ten minutes of the video of the announcement, so you can hear the exact quote yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPRJArsQjxk
"Where we have Kindle editions, Kindle sales are now 35% of books." According to the chart it went from 13% in February to 35% in May with the launch of the Kindle 2. During the Kindle 1 period it was in the 5% - 10% range. |
BTW... the name's Joe. I haven't used it in the recent posts, but while I use this handle a lot, I don't
live behind it!
Thanks for that.
Good quote. Completely unqualified. And I don't for a minute believe it.
I feel certain that if we twisted Bezos' arm, we'd learn that it was a rather finely-tuned stat. Like I said in another post, I have no particular qualm with that, he's a salesman, after all. I just want enough information to know where the facts end and the spin begins.
Strip out all of the freebies and PD-near-free and the not-unreasonable python-lump of
backlist sales, then the number of
newly released books - which I feel is a more realistic ongoing figure - would have a
much lower percentage.
The first graphic he showed with the numbers of Kindle Editions in the store is a wonderful example of lying with statistics: the time scale across the graph is not linear. To greatly improve the 'acceleration' in edition numbers, the initial point (Nov 07) is much closer to the introduction of the Kindle II (Feb 09) than it should be.
If you take the two right-hand data points and say that the difference between the two is a three month gap, then the Nov 07 data point, properly scaled, should be somewhere off the left edge of the screen.
-Joe