Amazon Anticipate Strong Kindle 3 Sales During The 2010 Festive Season
The Christmas sales season is a very important time for any retailer. As much as 40% of annual sales returns can be achieved in the few weeks leading up to Christmas. For Amazon, the 2009 Christmas period was an extremely important period, for a variety of reasons over and above the normal sales surge.
The Kindle 2.0 e-book reader, released in February of 2009, and which had already proved itself to be a massively successful product for Amazon, became the online retail giant’s number one selling, most gifted and most wished for product ever. It has been Amazon’s top selling product ever since.
Amazon actually sold more Kindle books than traditional printed books for the first time ever on Christmas day of 2009. 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. Many of these would almost certainly have been free Kindle books (there are 1.8 million of these available).
Even so, it was still an important milestone for Amazon and a sign of things to come. At the moment, Amazon regularly sells more Kindle books than hardcover books – by a factor of 180 to 100. 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 upgraded Kindle 3 reader. There were a variety of technical improvements – including extra memory (enough space for 3,500 Kindle books), an improved e-ink technology display with sharper contrast and a smaller and lighter casing. The new, entry level Kindle – which can be yours for just $ 139 – was also revealed. For another $ 50 you can get hold of the Wi-Fi plus 3G model – which is still significantly cheaper than the original $ 359 launch price of the Kindle 2.0.
With a $ 139 entry level price the Kindle is pretty close to being an impulse buy for many. You could pay quite a bit more for something such as a mobile phone or a mid level mp3 player!
Despite the launch of the Apple iPad – predicted to be a “Kindle Killer” by many business analysts – the Kindle 3 quickly went on to become the fastest selling Kindle to date. Amazon sold out of Kindles – for the umpteenth time – and customers faced a wait of up to five weeks before their reader could be delivered.
The Kindle had already established itself as the market leading e-book reader. The upgraded Kindle 3 simply increased the gap between the Kindle and the chasing pack. The fact that the Kindle’s only genuinely credible competitor is a versatile tablet computer which costs over three times the price of the Kindle tells a story in itself.
Amazon will certainly not be counting their chickens before they’re hatched – but they must surely be anticipating that their new, enhanced Kindle will provide them with another set of record breaking sales figures this festive season. It will be interesting to see whether or not Amazon run out of Kindles again in the run up to Christmas. Customers are limited to a maximum of three Kindles each right now – a clear indication of Amazon’s confidence in their number one reader. It looks set to be another Kindle Christmas in 2010.
Discover the Amazon Kindle 3 for yourself. It’s the future of reading – electronic textbooks are already here.
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