comparison.pngFrom Electronista:

Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth today estimated that Amazon would sell about five million Kindle readers this year. The company should thrive on the combination of the redesign and the lower $139 price. The numbers would more than double over the course of the next two years to reach 11.5 million in 2012.

Anmuth expected the price gap to keep Amazon safe from the effect of the iPad. The new Kindles create a “bifurcated” market where cheap, narrow purpose e-readers occupy the high-end multi-purpose environment, he said. …

The article goes on to make a number of other iPad/Kindle comparisons. I don’t know why people keep doing this. The units are targeted at different audiences, as the analyst correctly points out.

I’m currently on vacation at a resort in New York and I’ve seen some Nooks and Sony Readers, but no Kindles – about 5 total. This is pretty few given the size of the place. In order to do the definitive research project on this topic, I asked each one of the users if they would have rather bought an iPad. All of them, without exception, said that they had no interest in the iPad, but just wanted something small and portable to carry around. Case closed

Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Kindle thoughts:

    Out of 12 co-workers, 5 of us have Kindles. No one has any other kind of eReader. We’re a software development company.

    One co-worker has a Kindle for himself but got his wife an iPad. He’s an Apple guy – Mac, iPhone, etc. – but said he tried reading on the iPad and said it was awful. The screen is too hard to read and the device is too big. He likes his Kindle. He said that the iPad is great for media – movies, TV, video, etc. but not really for anything else.

    My daughter has Kindle for PC on her netbook where the screen is the same size as an iPad. She doesn’t like reading on it, too much glare, hard on her eyes, etc. She’s getting a Kindle for her birthday.

    Reading on a smart phone – are you kidding me? It’s just too small.

  2. @ Common Sense: “Reading on a smart phone – are you kidding me? It’s just too small.”

    I sooooo agree with this. I can’t believe people actually “read” on a smart phone unless you love the sound of clicking (or swiping). It could generate a whole new category: “cricket reading”, for the noise it makes.

    But I’ve been humbled by the facts before. 🙂

    Amazon claims about 20% of its e-book sales come from customers who do not have a Kindle attached to their account — which tells me quite a lot of folks use the PC or Mac reader (really?) to read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or some combination of smart phone and iPad.

    There is one more way to spin this stat that might make your eyeballs bulge, Tex Avery-like: if the Nook claims close to 20% of the e-book space, then Amazon’s “people-without-a-Kindle” sales are almost the same size as all of the Nook. Given the file formats are incompatible, it means almost all of those non-Kindle Kindle e-books are mutually exclusive to the Nook as well.

    Things that make you say: Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!

  3. I work for a manufacturing company. We have 1 Sony Reader, 2 Nooks, and 11 Kindles out of 100 or so people. We had one additional Sony reader, but he converted to Kindle after breaking two Sony Readers while traveling. Interestingly enough, when he had the Sony his wife didn’t want an ereader, but within a week of him purchasing a K3 she also had to have one. I’ve yet to see or hear of one person where I work have an iPad.

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