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Kindle eBay prices slipping: Buy It Nows as low as $549.99
January 20, 2008 | 10:32 am
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By David Rothman
Kindle prices are slipping and the supply is growing on eBay, according to Munsey’s Technosnarl. This morning I myself spotted a Buy It Now Kindle as low as $549.99. So maybe tough bargainers can land one in the upper $400s.
Puzzle of the day: Technsnarl mumbled something about the need for a universal e-book format (sarcasm, advocacy of ASCII, change of heart, who knows?)—perhaps a rather different sentiment from David Moynihan’s previous ones. Nice going if there’s no catch here. .Epub, David? If so, and if you want the IDPF and its format validator monitored closely—look, that’s exactly where I’m coming from.
David M.’s guess on Amazon vs. competitors: “Sales ranks mean nothing, but based on one title I’ve checked a couple days in a row, it looks like the Kindle Store’s doing 4-5,000 books a day, so two months into existence, Bezos is the leading ebook retailer by a factor of two. Imagine how much better those numbers would be with a universal consumer format.”
A little Kindle delivery information: Here. An order placed a week before Christmas may arrive in late January.
Update on Munseys site, the successor to the much-missed Blackmask: The home page loads a bit faster than an earlier version of Munseys, but the organization still isn’t as logical as Blackmask’s; is it too late to return to the old arrangement? I’d welcome readers’ thoughts on Blackmask vs. Munseys. Might be useful feedback for David M. Meanwhile I certainly agree with his providing “over 20,000 rare and hard to find titles in 10 formats.” For now, alas, the Tower of eBabel still looms.
Related: Sold-out Kindle lacks rave reviews, in the Seattle PI. The article notes the $400 price, $100 higher than the Sony Reader’s. Only one research analyst provided sales projects—James McQuivey of Forrester Research. The company’s sticking to a first-year figure quoted here earlier of perhaps 50,000.
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Comments:
[...] to think this simple post garnered such confusion. Well forgive me the mystery, technosnarl is after all an economic term, so I’d assumed a [...]
Twaddle. The Kindle has not received mixed reviews. It has received universally high reviews from people who actually own one. Nearly all of the 1-star reviews come from people who don’t have one bitching about some inane crap like an e-ink screen not having video.
Hi, Kyle. Feel free to express Kindle-love, with specifics on why you like it. I see many good points. All E Ink machines, however, in my opinion, appear to have contrast issues if nothing else–one reason I like the Cybook’s bold-everything command. Thanks. David
Not sure why he says 4k-5k books a day makes Amazon number one by a factor of 2. Fictionwise, now that we’ve combined operations with ereader, has sales in that range. So does Ellora’s cave. Amazon could be number one, barely, or they could be as low as 3rd or even 4th place.
Not to say that Amazon won’t be a major force, they will, especially after they get their production ramped up. I’m just saying, 4k to 5k books a day is no where near a clear first place in the ebook world, certainly not by “a factor of 2″.
50k units in the first year might be low, but my projections are no more than 100k tops. There probably were fewer than 10k units in the initial shipments based on our analysis, and possibly as few as 3k units.
-Steve P.
If you consider that fictionwise sells multiple formats to a wide variety of devices and Amazon sells only to Kindle owners, the stats look a lot more impressive. If Amazon sold 50k Kindles and they sell 5k books a day, that is 10 books a day from each Kindle user. If you assume that they sold less than 50k, the number of books per Kindle owner jumps. I’m sure that a lot of those orders were for the gutenberg classics that are floating around for $1.99 at the Kindle store, but it’s still impressive. To me it shows that Amazon didn’t overestimate the benefits of wireless shopping, sample chapters, and wireless delivery.
P.S. I don’t mean any criticism of fictionwise. I’ve ordered from fictionwise in the past and will again in the future. You guys have a great store. If nothing else, the ability to get those pulp story mags in e format is something I couldn’t get anywhere else. If I could make humble suggestions, I would suggest making your site easy to browse from the Kindle browser so people can order from your site just as easily as they can from Amazons.
Rothman: To me the Kindles killer feature is the wireless. I’m one of those people who has gotten tired of fiddling with devices to integrate them into my lifestyle. The Kindle is my first eBook reader because it is the first one that has wireless delivery. That’s what made me order one after hem-hawing for several years about getting a Sony Reader.
Okay. Wow. I just realized my math error. One out of ten Kindle owners are buying a book each day not ten for each one owner. Duh. I still think this is a pretty good amount to sell considering that their customer base is probably smaller.
Why all the whine? We have a universal book format. Two in fact. HTML and XTML. Show me a book that cannot be encapsulated in at least one of those markups.
Jeez. Wake up.