Kindle Will Be 10% of Amazon Sales in 2012

[S Livingston]

eBooks are the way forward, it'll be 10% and then more as the eReader revolution continues.

[JSWolf]

Gotta love yet ANOTHER article that guesses about Amazon's sales of Kindles. Amazon doesn't release numbers. So that chart is totally guesswork. Give it up. Guessing about Amazon's Kindle sales is like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. It just isn't going to work.

[Namekuseijin]

guess the other 90% of Amazon sales is games and movies.

When is the Kindle playing games and movies again?...

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

guess the other 90% of Amazon sales is games and movies.

When is the Kindle playing games and movies again?...

Could be sooner than you think:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=139042

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by lestatar

!!!

Indeed! Critical mass for digital books and ebook readers is rapidly approaching, if not already here.

Though I have been reading digitally for years, only recently have I gone and grabbed a dedicated ebook reader. I am thoroughly enjoying my K3 experience thus far.

However, nothing will ever quite match the wonderfully tactile sensation of turning paper pages with my fingers or the unique smell of books as they age. At least to this lifelong book lover.

Originally Posted by lestatar

Great question and I think I understand the distinction you are making here.

If I had to choose, indeed, it is reading that I love best, no question. I think it safe to say we all feel similarly here

Still, the physical nature of books themselves is pretty satisfying to my senses on so many levels. Smell, touch, visuals...even the sound of pages turning is pleasing to me.

A [not so] secret quirk of mine: when purchasing books from brick and mortar stores, I will handle as many copies as I need to in order to find the ones that are in the most pristine condition. I have actually gone to multiple retailers in order to obtain the mint-est copy of a book from certain favorite authors. Fairly easy to do though in my native NYC, especially with multiple BNs around.

An ex-gf commented that it was exactly like someone picking fruit.

My books also stay in as mint a condition as possible, even after reading. No folded pages, no torn covers, no broken spines, no heavily damaged dust jackets, etc...

what can I say?

PS: as an Amazon customer pretty much from when they started, I distinctly remember being hooked on them after I received my very first book order and saw how well they packaged my books.

They had me at the shrink-wrap.

I'm with you, I'm a lover of books and a lover of reading. I love my reader and I gets tons of use out of it...but I still have multiple bookshelves and piles of books everywhere. And it makes me happy as a puppy with a new chew toy.

[The Redbaron]

e books being cheaper than paperbacks, and delivered instantly... to me it's a no brainer. I realise in the US paperbacks can qualify for free delivery but most other places in the world Amazon's delivery prices for physical items are mega expensive, although super fast (both my kindles arrived in under a week US to AUS).

Love the Charlie Brown analogy re guessing Amazon's sales etc, but if a lot are people like me who only use Amazon for books (now ebooks) it isn't hard to see ebooks taking over from real books on numbers.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

I'm taking all Amazon sales figures with a grain of salt. Since there's no substance to the claims in the form of actual statistics, we can't really trust the conclusions.

As L. J. says, we don't know if they're talking units or sales or profit or what, exactly. Do free ebooks count as sales? What about all of those short stories sold separately?

Amazon is always very specific that its unit sales for ebooks do NOT include free books. They's said it over and over: what's not to believe?

In the analyst call, Bezos was specific that the trumping of pbooks by ebooks at Amazon was BOTH in unit sales AND in revenue even while units sales and revenue of pbooks continued to grow.

Regarding the Citibank analyst estimates, another poster here claimed: "So that chart is totally guesswork." Just like the work of credible research firms, this same poster thinks their work is garbage. The reality is the handful of analysts who follow a stock for a living get inside information, as do the handful of big research companies, to ensure that their views are "in the zone".

It is NOT in Amazon's best interest to have a lot of phony info floating around; nor can it issue statements that are phony because people can and do go to jail for false statements regarding the companies they work for. (Oh, if that only applied to politics!)

[vigna04]

I'm not surprised... their margin is probably huge from the Kindle. Remember when the first Kindle released and was sold for $359ish?? A LOT of people bought it at that price still.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by vigna04

I'm not surprised... their margin is probably huge from the Kindle. Remember when the first Kindle released and was sold for $359ish?? A LOT of people bought it at that price still.

That was the going rate for a connected reader in those days.
Unconnected readers went for $299.
And at the low volumes they used to sell (tens of thousands instead of by the million as they do now) those prices were appropriate for the time, which is why they sold. The people who bought them got to use them, don't forget, so we got our money's worth. (Still are, since those early readers still work as well as they ever did.)

For all the griping over Kindle prices in recent years there is no evidence their prices are either exorbitantly high or sub-cost low. Since large, motivated competitors have managed to match or undercut their prices, the implication is that they are merely aggressively competitive.

Aggressively competitive seems to work just fine for the vast majority of consumers.

[SensualPoet]

I am struck by how much the ereading space has evolved since this thread was started six months ago.

[rdjack21]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

I am struck by how much the ereading space has evolved since this thread was started six months ago.

Oh man did not even notice that and here I was thinking that this was all recent news.

You are right the EBook/EReading space has changed considerably in the last six months and is still in flux.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

I am struck by how much the ereading space has evolved since this thread was started six months ago.

Indeed. This moment has already arrived:

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Long before then, ....... folks will whine about missing the physicality of the page turn buttons...

Graham

[catsittingstill]

Originally Posted by vigna04

I'm not surprised... their margin is probably huge from the Kindle. Remember when the first Kindle released and was sold for $359ish?? A LOT of people bought it at that price still.

Like me.

Because I saw the utility of a book that could be a bunch of my books, and also be books I hadn't even bought yet.
A book that could be any of the Project Gutenberg classics *for free*.
A book that included a dedicated research assistant that would promptly present me with a compilation of how many times a given word or phrase occurred in each of my books, and what was written around it in each place. (If only it would do that with science paper PDFs.)
A book that could access the web, if slowly and clunkily, without computer, ethernet or wifi.

A magic book.

I love physical books; my shelves are full of them. But hey, who wouldn't want a magic book?

Yeah, I paid 400$ for it. I thought about it for months--that's a lot of money for me. But it was *totally* worth the price.

Of course I'm glad they're cheaper now. And smaller and quicker and the screens are better. But there were very good reasons to buy it when it first came out. Which was why it sold out before the first one shipped and stayed sold out for months, if I recall.