'Only' 50000 Kindles to be sold in 1st year?

[Ervserver]

Don't get confused by looking at Amazon's website and seeing the words "Due to heavy demand Kindles are sold out" Heavy demand could be 300 people or 30,000 people. I say Sony will add wireless capabilities and drop the prices to $250. The Kindle will dwindle in 2008

Originally Posted by silvania

......Sony is likely benefitting from the enormous error made by Amazon in not having sufficient units on hand for christmas. That will keep them alive for one more year. But once Amazon gets their act together Sony has to be toast in this market. Amazon just has too much marketing might.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by Ervserver

Don't get confused by looking at Amazon's website and seeing the words "Due to heavy demand Kindles are sold out" Heavy demand could be 300 people or 30,000 people. I say Sony will add wireless capabilities and drop the prices to $250. The Kindle will dwindle in 2008

Well that would certainly make things interesting! I wonder how long they'd be willing to absorb those costs. What I really want to know is how much they're paying for their best-sellers and new releases compared to Amazon. If it's on a par they might actually be able to compete. I'm more concerned for our Sony Reader owners that they'll decide to get out of the market.

[Ervserver]

Amazon's roots is selling books, they should make their Kindle books available to all readers. Can make more money selling books than selling readers

[Alisa]

I agree. Letting other devices use the format seems like it would be profitable. After all, the device, expensive as it is, probably has a very low profit margin. Maybe they're concerned that people will choose one of the other devices because they're cheaper and then not be lured into the subscription content which, while cheaper than books, is probably a very high profit margin for them.

[wallcraft]

Profit margins on the Kindle must be huge. The hardware can't cost much more than the PRS-505 and Amazon is selling direct.

We won't really know what Amazon will do with AZW until they start selling outside the US. My guess is that a non-US Kindle won't be able to buy US AZW's and a US Kindle won't be able to buy non-US AZW's. However, at that point Amazon may let both read secure MOBI, since MobiPocket seems to have worldwide rights to its titles.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Profit margins on the Kindle must be huge. The hardware can't cost much more than the PRS-505 and Amazon is selling direct.

We won't really know what Amazon will do with AZW until they start selling outside the US. My guess is that a non-US Kindle won't be able to buy US AZW's and a US Kindle won't be able to buy non-US AZW's. However, at that point Amazon may let both read secure MOBI, since MobiPocket seems to have worldwide rights to its titles.

For all we know, Sony could be selling the hardware at a loss. Plus there are 3 years of R&D on the Kindle to recoup. Most of that I expect was in the store and Whispernet, though.

I think it would be great if they supported Mobi. The think I wonder about is whether the use of AZW which is different in name only is because of their agreements with other Mobi sellers. I seem to recall reading here that the reason that Mobipocket.com's prices were always higher was that they had an agreement not to undercut other Mobi sellers. If Amazon is bound by that, it may explain why they did AZW.

[Ervserver]

for all we know the Kindle and the Sony could be made in the same plant

[brecklundin]

Originally Posted by datrop

Now, one just needs to guess reseller demand. Considering the price premium for a new in box Kindle, the Wii might be a good proxy. eBay shows about 60,000 Wiis sold (I'm low-balling their number of US-only Wiis of 61,556) for a two week period starting Nov 29; their search engine goes no further. For the month of Nov, there were 981,000 Wiis sold in the US. Of course, seasonality ruins any sort of linear approximation for a 2 week slice of that month of sales. However, it's reasonable to lower-bound things by assuming that those 60,000 Wiis came entirely from last month's sales of 981,000 => at least 6% of units go to the reseller market.

Well, unless you have access to different search tools then exist on the eBay site or the eBay API you can only find the total number of live or completed listings not the total number of SOLD items. Sold item totals numbers are considered internally confidential and by eBay.

Just thought I would point this out.

Here is a site that has developed some tools to determine the numbers of sold items. It's sorta-kinda pretty cool. Here are the numbers for the Kindle over the past 30-days:

http://data.terapeak.com/?query=kind...te=2007-12-12&

[brecklundin]

btw, you need to search on more the simply Kindle...or you get other items with kindle in the auction title...I would do title-only searches using kindle +amazon. If ya do title +description you can pick up listings that will have either of the words in the description thus again skewing the results.

[datrop]

Originally Posted by brecklundin

btw, you need to search on more the simply Kindle...or you get other items with kindle in the auction title...I would do title-only searches using kindle +amazon. If ya do title +description you can pick up listings that will have either of the words in the description thus again skewing the results.

All good points (I was doing title searches for "amazon kindle")--overshooting by a little (couple of amazon kindle coupons, book covers, but largely the $400+ device itself) still gives an upper-bound, which indicates that the Kindle is not quite in iphone-like sales territory in its first month. Most everyone probably guessed as much, anyway.