Apparently, myself and the rest of the tech world that slammed the Kindle for being essentially a portable Amazon storefront, were way wrong when it came to the Kindle -- people are willing to part with $400 for a Kindle, because Amazon's stock of Kindles has apparently sold out in less than six hours.
Of course, we don't know how many were in that stock, but the relative availability of the Kindle (more to be shipped out next week on 11/29) suggests that this initial stock was meant to be large enough for some people to say "I got my Kindle!" while still producing a good number of hours for selling out. There's no incentive for Amazon to have a large amount ready to ship on announcement -- the way Amazon works, someone's not likely to cancel an order just because they have to wait a week for it -- no one else is going to sell Kindles except Amazon. They just need that number to be large enough such that if someone does ask how many they sold on the first day, it's not something ridiculous like 10.
I assume the initial stock was extremely limited, perhaps no more than 10,000 units. This is Amazon we are talking about here -- the company that sells out of their Wiis in a few minutes. 10,000 is a respectable number -- it's a large enough number that Amazon can say "That's all that we could have in time for the announcement", and it's small enough to say "We sold out of them in a few days". The fact that they sold out in 6 hours suggests that the inital allotment may be even less than 10,000 units. My own personal guess to the number is in the range between one and three thousand. If we work backwards from Nintendo's example, they sold 600,000 Wiis in a week, which becomes about 1 Wii sold per second. Even if Amazon were to sell 1 Kindle every second, that calculates into -- 1 x 60 x 60 x 5 = 1,800.
I love books, but when I logged onto Amazon yesterday morning and saw the announcement on the front page, my initial reaction was not to click the "Buy Now" button, but to read more about it. People have been saying that it's the iPod for books, but that's not accurate, because of the one big difference. The iPod never asked me to buy a whole new music library for my device. All the CDs I had didn't suddenly not exist to the iPod. The Kindle is asking you to pretend your book library doesn't exist. If you want your book on the Kindle, be prepared to shell out some money to have a digital copy of the book.
What I'd like to see implemented on Amazon is that they make available digitally any book I purchase physically. Give me an incentive to buy a Kindle, and to read my books on it. My physical book library will long outlast the Kindle's lifetime, and probably my own lifetime.
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing had this to say regarding the Kindle:
Here's the biggest mystery of the Internetiverse for me today: why is it that Amazon, the most customer-focused, user-friendly company in the world of physical goods, always makes a complete balls-up hash out of digital delivery of goods? You'd think that they'd be the smartest people around when it comes to using the Internet to sell you stuff you want, but as soon as that stuff is digital, they go from customer-driven angels to grabby, EULA-toting horrors. Why does the Web make Amazon go crazy?
This mystery is definitely something that's been on my mind -- Amazon has been great to me for buying books and other items -- I'll gladly plunk down 2 or 3 grand for a new camera, but when it comes to digital media, Amazon has yet to earn a single penny from me, and part of that is due to the feeling that something that exists purely as a DRM-locked digital file isn't permanent enough. That being said, the field of e-books is a frontier yet to be explored, but I've yet to see a system that works. This is a good try at trying to re-invorate the market, but I suspect that the winner of this will be someone who can make the experience more like a real book and less like a giant PDA.
Leave a comment