images.jpgCnet has a good interview, done by David Carnoy, with Amazon’s Ian Freed, vice president of digital. Here are two excerpts. The first is about market share. Carnoy asks Freed to comment on B&N and Apple saying they each have a 20% market share:

Honestly, something doesn’t add up because we’re pretty sure we’re 70 to 80 percent of the market. So, something, somewhere isn’t quite working right. I encourage you to do some more research. Obviously, from the beginning of Amazon we’ve been very metrics-focused and we don’t typically throw out numbers we don’t firmly believe in. Take that 70 to 80 percent number and add up all the others and something somewhere isn’t going to add up.

Second, Carnoy asks about the tripling of Kindle growth rate:

There’s actually two triplings. One is the number of e-books sold in the first quarter of 2009 versus the first quarter of 2010. And then the other is after we dropped the price of the Kindle to $189, we saw a tripling of the growth rate year over year [of the device itself].

More interesting stuff in the article. Freed says, among other things, that publishers have seen a drop in sales of ebooks whose price is over $9.99

2 COMMENTS

  1. Key to this market-share question, which Freed is being too polite to describe, probably, is that the bulk of the general press (not all of it) badly and loudly misinterpreted Steve Jobs’ more careful statement about Apple iPad’s share of the e-books market at a press conference.

    This was partially due to the fact that the press went with the slide label shown(which was clearly misleading and it’s up to the reader whether that was clever or inadvertent) instead of with Steve Jobs’ actual words.

    Full particulars at http://bit.ly/ibooknums

  2. How does this figure into the equation? A bunch of Kindle-owners also own a nook or Sony, AND and iPad and/or iPhone/iPod touch, not to mention a smartphone — and use the online stores/apps directly linked to those devices’ manufacturers’ preferred stores, in addition to the Kindle store. The percentages described don’t seem mutually exclusive. When all non-Kindle devices are taken together, I’m pretty sure we’re not talking about a tiny minority of Kindle owners having multiple devices with multiple reader apps installed and in use.

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