The updated Amazon kindle 2 went on sale in late February of 2009 and it was widely believed to be a marked improvement on what was an already successful product. Among other improvements it boasted an improved battery life, faster page turns, a text-to-speech facility (it reads books to you) and space for around 1500 books in its internal memory (albeit that the option to use an external SD card, a feature of the original kindle, was no longer available).
Only three months later Amazon announced that its new Kindle DX would be launching in the summer of 2009. The DX includes most of the main features of the kindle 2 but sports a larger 9.7″ screen, which features automatic rotation between portrait and landscape views. Also featured is the ability to read native pdf files without the need for conversion – for the first time in the Kindle range.
The enhanced display of the Kindle DX makes it the ideal choice for reading newspapers, magazines and academic textbooks. Quite a few major newspapers announced that they would offer the Kindle device at a discount to anyone signing up to an annual subscription.
Amazon have not released official figures – but it’s believed that something between $86 to $96 million of kindle reader sales were generated between November 2007 and August 2008. Don’t forget, that’s only for the hardware – sales of electronic books would need to be accounted for separately. Industry analysts are currently estimating that kindle sales (for the device only) will reach $ 1.6 billion by 2012.
Good business for Amazon – and a significant move away from only marketing other manufacturer’s products to having their own product to bring to market. More importantly though, whilst not exactly tied in, kindle users will be heavily motivated to provide Amazon with a level of repeat sales that other merchants can only dream of.
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