So, the story making the rounds on the tech and gadget websites is that real sales figures for the Amazon Kindle e-book have finally surfaced and the total is 240,000 units. To put that into some sort of context, Apple sold almost 11,000,000 iPods just in March of this year. So there’s no imminent danger of the Kindle becoming the must-have gadget any time soon, but the sales figures are pretty much in line with what “The Experts” said. “The Experts” also expect sales to double or triple over the next four quarters. Combined with the sales of the e-books themselves (Amazon says they now have 145,000 titles available), the Kindle represents a billion-dollar-a-year revenue stream. That’s decent, though probably not as earth-shattering as some of the early pronouncements.
One blogging buddy of mine simply adores her Kindle and credits it with re-energizing her reading habit, and another blogger I regularly read is similarly ga-ga about his. Even one of the little old ladies I do tech support for is talking about buying one, so it’s clear that Amazon has managed to capture interest in an e-book reader far beyond the futile efforts of earlier e-book devices. I still can’t envision wanting one myself, though. I’ve never been one to tote a book along wherever I go, and remain content with paper books at home.
Unless…blogger and magazine editor Rex Hammock, who likes his Kindle (but with some reservations), mentions the 500-pound gorilla of gizmos in this post from May: could the Kindle survive at all if Apple decided to make an e-book reader as an extension of their iPhone product? The current form factor of the iPhone is too small to work well for in-depth reading, but if they made it a bit bigger it would be adequate. And if the device had the ability to do everything the iPod Touch (the phone-less iPhone) does PLUS e-books, it would be a formidable gadget indeed.
I have a Kindle and I like it just fine. It’s much more convenient to carry around than most books plus it has a couple of “experimental” features that serve me well, particularly the basic web feature. I use it to check out what movies are showing and just this morning I looked up a recipe while I was at the grocery store…a service that I’m too cheap to add to my phone service. I’m glad to have the thing.