On Independent.ie, Shane Richmond has interviewed Amazon’s voice president of Kindle Content, Russ Grandinetti, about the purchasing habits of Kindle customers. The article has some interesting insights into the way Amazon looks at its users, and the way its users look at the Kindle.
Grandinetti attributes the Kindle’s success to its users’ love of reading, rather than just wanting to get their hands on a neat gadget. When Amazon compares the six months before a customer bought a Kindle to the six months after, it finds that, on average, Kindle owners buy three times as many books.
Kindle buyers are not primarily gadget buffs, says Grandinetti, they just want to “spend more minutes of the day connecting with the words that authors put down”.
Of course, there are still aspects of the service that could stand to be improved, Richmond notes. For example, it’s not yet possible to gift e-books to other people in the UK. Grandinetti admits that Amazon’s feature wish list is longer than the list of things it can currently add, but is working on improving its Kindle service with more features and greater availability.
He is also optimistic that the Kindle will still have a place even in the age of the tablet computer, noting that “People combine their use of an e-Ink device with an app on a tablet or smartphone.”
This is exactly the opinion I have about E-ink devices. I’m not exactly the demographic described above. I DO like and have a number of shiny gadgets. But I didn’t add my Kindle to that pile because I look at it as a new toy — though of course there’s an element of that — more so it’s a means to an end. The end being a convenient way to carry a small library of my books. (Not to mention the side benefit of avoiding boxes of books sitting around.) This obviously doesn’t have to apply to the Kindle only, but it’s a good example. This is the main reason I do not understand the argument that the dedicated reader market will be swallowed by the iPad and its ilk. Yes, tablets may eventually provide an equal reading experience. When that happens the dedicated market will become less dominant (think MP3 players pre and post smartphone). The point is people who are buying Kindles now aren’t buying them because they want to browse the net (although you can… poorly) or because they want to play Angry Birds, they buy them because they want to read, and that is something it does remarkably well.