Amazon’s new Kindle for PC App, launched early Tuesday morning, is a smash hit. The Kindle Store bestseller list is proof, even if you must read a few tea leaves to appreciate this.
The PC App is free, and people testing it are filling their PC hard drives with dozens of titles from among the 19,890 free book listings in the Kindle Store. Why wouldn’t they?
Of course, they can also use the Kindle for PC app to download thousands of other free books from several other third-party sources, thanks to a new "we play well with others" approach from Amazon. But the Kindle Store is still teeming with traffic from lovers of “free.”
On the Kindle Store’s list of bestselling books—the one that updates hourly and really reflects the comparative velocity of unit sales regardless of price over various recent chunks of time—77 of the top 100 titles were free at one point yesterday or were priced at one cent.
Seventy of the top 81 titles fit one of the free or near-free categories. The number of freebies in the top 100 often hovers around 50 per cent, but 77 per cent of the top 100 and 87 per cent of the top 81 amounted to dramatic new highs. The top 100 bestselling Kindle books included 28 free promotional titles, 47 free public domain titles, one title that was free until yesterday, one title for a penny, and 23 titles for more than a penny.
Meanwhile, the relative sales rankings of the top-selling paid blogs and periodicals are plummeting, strictly in relative terms (and not, necessarily, in units sold). For instance, the Kindle edition of the Kindle Nation blog, the #1 bestselling paid blog among the 7,453 listed in the Kindle Store, has fallen to an overall multimedia sales ranking of 534 from the 250-to-450 range where it usually hangs out. This is also natural, since blogs and newspapers are not available from within the Kindle for PC App. That may make sense for newspapers, by the way, but why blogs?
None of this is bad for Amazon, the Kindle, the Kindle for PC App, or even for Kindle-available blogs such as Kindle Nation Daily or TeleRead.
There are over a billion PCs in use in the world, and perhaps somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.25 million Kindles. It’s natural to assume that, as word spreads about international (but not universal, right, Canada?) availability of a free Kindle app for the PC, there will be hundreds of thousands of new Kindle readers each day. And this is in addition to many existing Kindle owners who are trying out the additional device.
A natural thing to do, while test-driving the Kindle for PC App before investing much in a library for it, is to scarf up free books. Then, if people like it, they can think about spending actual folding money on a few Kindle books and, perhaps, they might even consider buying a Kindle if the combination of price point and portability work for them.
Anyway you slice it, it seems likely that the number of people reading Kindle content on any kind of device is going to have, at the very least, doubled from Tuesday morning November 10 to, say, December 31, 2009. Sometime between now and Thanksgiving the launch of the Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Blackberry, Kindle for Droid (am I getting ahead of myself) and other Apps will only add fuel to a well-kindled fire. Oops, there’s that word again.
If one out of every 100 PC owners tries the Kindle for PC App, that’s another 10 million people browsing around the Kindle Store. Sooner or later one of them is going to make an actual cash transaction, wouldn’t you think? So the Kindle for PC and all those free Kindle titles are loss leaders, except that since it is all virtual, there is no loss involved.
Let’s pretend your name is Jeff and you want to do a little magical thinking….
If one out of every 50 of those browsers decides to buy a Kindle, that’s 200,000 additional Kindles sold.
And if even half of this comes to pass, authors and publishers will be beating down the door to Kindle publication, and the folks at Barnes & Noble are going to have a new name for Jeffrey P. Bezos.
"Daddy."
Magical thinking?
Maybe not so much.
Editor’s note: Just a reminder that these are Steve’s personal views, adapted with permission from Kindle Nation. Thanks, Steve! – D.R.
The analysis is, at least, partially wrong. We need to look at first for how many days the book is in the top 100 list. If a book is in the top 100 list for more than last 4 or more days, then you can’t attribute this due to surge in purchase or download of kindle ebooks (free). I’ve just checked the bestsellers list: books with 3 days in top 100 list are only 12-15. The bestsellers list is always dominated by free or $0.01 books.
Even if the bestseller numbers aren’t accurate, the analysis is pretty much spot-on. Amazon has staged a big coup by opening up Kindle content to PC users, who (despite claims by many to the contrary) are a huge percentage of e-book readers.
And it’s no coincidence that Amazon has taken this step just after B&N has introduced e-books, but before they could release any Nooks into the wild.
I’m still waiting for Kindle books to all be DRM-free, so I can transfer them to my peripheral device of choice, my PDA… no such luck yet. But who knows? Based on Amazon’s strategy, we can probably expect the next major customer concession to come when another bookseller makes a large e-book offering, or when B&N goes fully international, or when a kick-ass ePub reader comes along…
Plus they could also do an iPhone app etc. for all the other countries along with your other platforms there – same thng for those, too.
Amazon’s creating a Kindle app for a PDA (or any other devices) still leaves us with DRM’d titles that I might not be able to move to my next device down the line (including my PC). That’s why tossing DRM is infinitely better: It allows me to transfer or convert the file and use it on other devices, on reading apps I already have.
I have no interest in loading a Kindle app on my PDA next to a B&N app and a Borders app and a Target app and an K-Mart app and a Starbucks app and a Fred’s Freaky Fiction app…