The festive season is an important time for any retailer. As much as 40% of yearly sales can be achieved in the weeks preceding Christmas. For Amazon, Christmas 2009 was an extremely important period, for a number of reasons in addition to the normal sales surge.
Amazon's Kindle 2.0 e-book reader, released in February of 2009, and which had already proven to be a very successful product for Amazon, became the online retail giant’s best selling, most gifted and most wished for product ever. It has been the number one selling item on the Amazon website ever since.
On Christmas day of 2009, Amazon sold more Kindle books than physical books for the first time ever. This would almost certainly have been influenced by those lucky people who received a Kindle as a Christmas gift trying out their Kindles by logging on to the Amazon website and downloading one or two Kindle books. A good number of these would almost certainly have been free, out of copyright, Kindle books (there are 1.8 million of these available to download).
Even so, it was still an important milestone for Amazon and a sign of things to come. Currently, Amazon regularly sells more Kindle books than hardback books – by a factor of 1.8 to 1. In all probability, it will just be a matter of time before Kindle books are outselling the paperback editions as well.
In the autumn of 2010, Amazon launched their enhanced Kindle 3 reader. There were a whole host of technical upgrades – including more memory (enough space for 3,500 Kindle books), a better e-ink technology display with increased contrast and a lighter and smaller casing. Amazon also unveiled their new, base level Wi-Fi only Kindle - which sells for just $ 139. The Wi-Fi plus 3G model is still available at $ 189 – still significantly lower than the $ 359 launch price of the Kindle 2.0.
An entry level price as low as $ 139 puts the Kindle pretty close to “impulse buy” territory. You could pay quite a bit more for something such as a mobile phone or a mid level mp3 player!
Despite the appearance of Apple’s iPad on the scene, the Kindle 3 became the fastest selling Kindle ever. Demand far exceeded supply and customers had to join a waiting list to get their Kindles delivered - up to five weeks later at one point.
The Kindle was already the market's top selling e-book reader. The release of the improved Kindle 3 opened the gap between Amazon's reader and the chasing pack even further. The fact that the Kindle’s only credible competition comes in the shape of a tablet computer which costs more than three times as much as the Kindle speaks volumes.
All things considered, Amazon must be anticipating another set of record breaking sales for their latest Kindle reader. It will be interesting to see whether or not they run out of stock again before Christmas. Currently, there is a three Kindles per customer limit – surely a sign of Amazon’s confidence in their top selling reader. Christmas 2010 looks set to be another record breaking season for the Kindle reader.
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