The Silicon Alley Insider is speculating that Amazon is currently selling about 48,000 Kindles per month. For the record, even though I’m in the publishing industry, I have no insider knowledge about the device’s sales rate. That said, 48K/month sounds extremely high to me.
Why? I’m pretty sure I’m tracking all the Kindle-related blogs and message boards, and I’m just not seeing any significant up-tick in postings, traffic or buzz. Although the Kindle has been back in stock and shipping for at least a couple of weeks now, I’m seeing roughly the same number of weekly posts/comments on the Kindle Forum and Kindle Korner as there were when it was out of stock.
You’d think the pent-up demand for the device would have caused a surge on these forums but that doesn’t appear to be the case. New Kindle-related blogs aren’t exactly crawling out of the woodwork either. There was a flurry of new ones back in December and January but I couldn’t tell you the last time I discovered a new one, and I tend to search for them every week!
Finally, there’s my old pal, Google Trends. According to this chart, Sony’s Reader is still getting more Google searches than Amazon’s Kindle, but the latter has closed the gap a bit on the former, perhaps attributable to the Kindle being back in stock.
We have an alternate number over at MobileRead. It’s a plausible number but I’m still trying to confirm it.
total screen production 35k
Jinke 35%
Amazon 30%
Sony 15%
others 20%
So Amazon would be getting around 11k a month.
Oops. Forgot the link.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=179364#post179364
I just figured out where they got that number (48k), and I agree that the number is questionable.
There is a news article that says PVI is producing between 60k and 80k screens per month, with a split of 60/40 between Amazon and Sony. 60%*80k = 48k Obviously there is something wrong here. What about Jinke or Netronix? Are they getting 0% per month?
Silicon Alley Insider should have confirmed the number before repeating it. Shame on them.
Here is the source:
http://www.digitimes.com/displays/a20080418PD204.html
What about the idea that only a minority percentage of a product’s users ever post on a forum or write to a blog?
I think that if Amazon would sell that many Kindles they would trumpet it all over. Nothing begets success like success, and lots of people would jump on the bandwagon just to have the latest bestselling gadget, so for this reason I doubt profoundly those numbers.
I agree with you, George. The first charge of buyers will be techies who are more interested in gadgets and have no interest in reading but love to talk about specs, etc. They are the ones posting—the later sales are probably going to be to people who read books on their Kindles. I would love to have one but will wait for second generation and in the meantime keep reading on my eBookwise, which I still enjoy very much.
I got a Kindle about 2 weeks ago, but haven’t posted about it much on the forums–I’ve been too busy putting the thing through its paces, trying to learn any shortcomings it might have before I hit the go/no go day when I have to decide whether to keep it or send it back.
I realize the Kindle books have DRM, but it displays DRM free Baen, Fictionwise and Manybooks books too.