More than half a year after Amazon introduced Kindle, a
handheld device that points to the future of electronic book readers industry, the
market still seems to lack demand. It’s not that people don’t want these
devices, but many of them stumble when they see the price tag.
Analysts believe this could be the reason why electronic
book devices such as Kindle didn’t appeal so much to the public. However,
things might change, as Amazon recently made a price cut, from $399 to $359.
Steve Weinstein, analysts with Pacific Crest in Portland, told
the San Francisco Chronicle that Kindle sales are expected to hit $2.5 billion
in sales by 2012, and estimated that the company sold 40,000 units this year alone,
with the original price tag.
“I don’t expect it to have the same impact on the industry
as the iPod had on the music industry,” Weinstein said, adding that Amazon will
probably sell somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 devices by the end of this
year.
Amazon offered for the paperback-sized device approximately
90,000 titles for download at launch and promised to also offer all the rest of
its 5.8 million titles catalogue in the near future.
From the consumers' point of view, the device should come in
handy, giving them the possibility of reading e-book anywhere, anytime. Weighing
just over 10 ounces and displaying text on a 6-inch diagonal screen, Kindle is
the perfect, easy to use reading device.
According to Amazon, Kindle can hold on its internal memory
somewhere around 200 books and by using a SD card you can always have access to
a huge library, as the average size of a book is somewhere around 500 Kbytes to
800 Kbytes.
In addition to the $359 customers have to pay for Kindle, they’ll
also have to add $9.99 for the electronic version of a bestseller, $5.99 to
$14.99 per month for newspaper subscriptions and $1.25 to $3.49 per month for
magazines.
Maybe if Amazon works a little more on the price issue, the
sales could go boom – this is the general problem that analysts have found
responsible for putting Kindle in the shadow of other amazing electronic devices that
overwhelmed the market today.
