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Amazon says it has sold millions of Kindles, beat out all of 2009 sales in just last 73 days
December 14, 2010 | 5:05 am
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By Chris Meadows
Found via Engadget and The Bookseller: Amazon makes another remarkably vague announcement of product sales. Calling the Kindle “far and away our bestselling gift item”, the Amazon Kindle Team posts to the Kindle Community forum that
Thanks to you, in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display. In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009. We’re grateful for and energized by the overwhelming customer response.
This type of announcement always reminds me of the joke about the lost hot air ballooning physicists who asked a jogger where they were. After a few minutes, the jogger replied, “You’re in a balloon!”
One physicist said to the other, "Just our luck to run into a mathematician"
"How do you know he was a mathematician?" asked the other.
"Well, in the first place he took a long time to answer; second, his answer was 100% correct, and third, it was totally useless."
There’s no reason not to assume that Amazon is being completely truthful when it says it has sold “millions”, or that it has sold more this holiday season than in all of 2009. It sure would be nice if they would be a little more specific, but somehow I just don’t think that’s in the cards.
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Comments:
It has repeatedly struck me that the smartphone and ereader business have a lot in common. Disruption of established industries, massive growth in both technology and sales, fierce competition and even fiercer partisans of the duelling companies. There is one striking difference though.
The smartphone market has a lot of figures and numbers to fuel conjecture and analysis, eg see http://www.asymco.com/
An example of how to use these would be the very cogent – I would say brilliant – in-depth analysis at http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html making use of RIM’s financial statements to dig up its hidden troubles.
When it comes to the ereader market we have… nothing, zilch, nada. All we get are propaganda puff pieces put out by the various companies, with Amazon at the forefront. The latest is this statement by Amazon. What does it really tell us? Merely that they are selling a lot of Kindles recently.
For it to mean more than that certain information would have to be available:
1. Sales data of last year versus this year.
2. International sales versus US only.
3. Total marketshare of the Kindle versus its competitors, for last year and current. It is quite possible to have great sales numbers yet actually show stagnating or declining market share in percentage terms. See the Apple iPhone.
4. The number of buyers that are not Amazon customers already. (It is possible that Amazon is cannibalising its own pbook customers thus suggesting an upper limit to growth).
5. The percentage of new K3 buyers versus those replacing older Kindles.
This is the minimum needed to get a snapshot of the industry, or to form any kind of analysis based on data. Otherwise all we get are opinions masquerading as facts. Of those we have plenty already especially from ‘analysts’ that appear unwilling to reveal the source data for their projections.
As to what this statement by Amazon actually signifies? “There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
“we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles”
That means they have sold more than 1,000,001 kindles. IF we believe them, which I don’t necessarily.