That’s what Steve Weinstein of Pacific Crest is saying. Credible?
Long term, I’m optimistic about the Kindle. Short term, who knows? When people fear loss of a job or house, will they really pay the current $359?
AMAZON
A sad tale of Amazon monetization: eReaderIQ and the affiliate program
Courtesy of the Kboards, a worrying item about struggling e-book sites and their ability to monetize engagement with Amazon - or not - has...
Are you sure there isn’t an extra zero — or even TWO — in there? I’d find even 80,000 hard to believe.
If K was doing so swell, Bezos would be braying. He’d be swinging that sales figure over his head like the proverbial dead cat (note: no animal was injured in the typing of this sentence!). But he’s not. So I tend to think he’s embarrassed and is shutting up.
K will meet its doom later this week. It’s name is iPhone 3G and its hitman is called the App Store.
Damn, there should be NO apostrophe in that final ITS!
And wtf does typing a Comment here sometimes invoke Firefox 2.x’s Quick Search feature? That doesn’t happen on any other site! You got bugs.
I tend to agree with Mike here about the iPhone. The nice thing about the iPhone is that the up-front cost isn’t a factor — you already made that decision to buy that particular phone. Reading ebooks on it is then just reduced to the cost of an individual book. I’ll post a longer analysis on pubfrontier.com.
Mike is right to some extent.
Amazon released the Kindle at the very start of this US economic downturn.
Many people are having to decide between buying food or the gas to get to the jobs that keeps food on the table.
If this were a year ago, the Kindle probably would be doing much better and Bezos would have something to brag about.
Now, as for the iPhone, at $199.99 this is far more affordable AND it can (or will soon be able to) read e-books as well.
The US economy is going to cause many people to put off *luxury* purchases and try to do more with their current tools.
I don’t share Mike’s love of the iPhone nor think it (or any phone) makes a great reading device, but I do see where economic pressures will cause more people to investigate what else they can do with the devices they already have be it iPhone, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry.
Personally, I’ve taken to visiting my library – A LOT. As much as I enjoy e-books, paper books aren’t so bad 😉
He says only 40,000 have been sold so far this year. So he is expecting some enormous number to sell in the remaining 6 months. He is most likely basing this on a PVI press release from early this year that projected those kinds of numbers for the second half of 2008. However, no one really knows how accurate such projections are, we won’t know until PVI releases official figures sometime in 2009.
Even so, just a month ago PVI report e-ink sales were drying up in the USA, so that does not bode well for the earlier predictions.
I’m sticking by my estimate that there are about 50k kindles out there now and it will hit about 100k total in the field by end of 2008. Most kindles sold and will sell in the november/december period in both 2007 and 2008. Very few are selling now. This is true of most electronic devices, the fourth quarter is the money quarter.
>>>I don’t share Mike’s love of the iPhone nor think it (or any phone) makes a great reading device,
I await the larger-screen mythical iPod Air. But until then …