amazon-books_thumb.jpgWith some financial analysts persuaded that the new Kindle Oasis will be a winner for e-reader and ebook sales alike, Amazon faces even more investor interest than usual ahead of its Q1 2016 earnings announcement. Due on April 28th, the results are expected to hinge, according to Amigo Bulls at least, on the performance of the Amazon Web Services division in the face of a difficult forex environment, but could, if in line with consensus analyst estimates, see year-on-year topline growth of 23 percent, 3 percent above Amazon’s recorded growth for the past four quarters.

The contribution of Amazon’s ebook and media sales to the mix, and the underlying growth therein, remains a wild card, given Amazon’s notorious secretiveness in that area. ChannelAdvisor, for instance, is a highly respected information source on ecommerce sales trends, but as its blog admits, “on Amazon, for example, ChannelAdvisor has very few media customers, so we have no visibility into that large chunk of Amazon’s business.” As Amigo Bulls remarks Amazon’s media sales are “a huge category in the overall e-commerce mix.”  That contribution remains unclear for now. Still, the consensus is that same-store sales growth overall may beat ChannelAdvisor’s March 2015 estimate of just under 15 percent.

What does all this mean for the reading and e-reading community? A robustly growing platform, obviously, facing few of the risk factors affecting more volatile areas like AWS. Kindle and Kindle Store fans need have few fears about growth and development prospects for their favorite ebook platform.

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Paul St John Mackintosh is a British poet, writer of dark fiction, and media pro with a love of e-reading. His gadgets range from a $50 Kindle Fire to his trusty Vodafone Smart Grand 6. Paul was educated at public school and Trinity College, Cambridge, but modern technology saved him from the Hugh Grant trap. His acclaimed first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published in 1997, and reissued on Kindle in 2013, and his second poetry collection, The Musical Box of Wonders, was published in 2011.

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