Source Claims 240K Kindles Sold 176
Naturalist writes "Exact data on (the Linux-powered) Kindle sales figures have been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about it, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Now TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M." We've been following the Kindle since its launch nine months ago.
Re:You know its slashdot when it's.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bzzzt. For anyone who has worked in banking in the US, M means thousand, and MM means million. It bugs me to this day when people write 240M when they mean 240 million.
Re:You know its slashdot when it's.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't seem like that many (Score:4, Insightful)
Put in perspective, if the numbers I'm seeing on websites about iPhone sales are correct, this puts the kindle somewhere on the order of 10-20 days worth of iPhone sales.... Yeah, not that great. Book reading on an existing device is useful and a lot of people will do it. Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market, particularly when it costs about twice as much as an iPhone (carrier subsidized) that does so much more....
Re:Compromise on L (Score:3, Insightful)
They always blend.
ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see how it could come in handy if you're on vacation and want to travel light, but IMO that's not nearly enough to overcome the negatives. I'll probably get an e-book reader in 2030 or something. There's no rush. First I want to see someone get it right.
Re:You know its slashdot when it's.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who has worked in banking in the US, M means thousand, and MM means million.
The target audience of slashdot is geeks - specifically, engineering/computer geeks. This audience uses K for thousand.
If you want to use M for thousand on bankerdot.org, sure, go for it.
Re:Doesn't seem like that many... But (Score:4, Insightful)
Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market
Yeah, but... I've been on Holiday in London for the past month. I take the tube (when it's actually running) everywhere and I've got to say the US$700 I spent on my iRex iLiad and about US$100 worth of novels has been a godsend on the train. The batteries last all day, bright light only improves the readability and much more portable than a laptop.
It may be a niche market but it has potential. Unfortunately, the only way this potential is going to be achieved is if the corporate players get their collective heads out of their ass and standardize on one, decent, open, portable format.
They also have to port previous works into an electronic format. Try to find Robert Ludlum's books on mobipocket format. You can't, at least not the pre-death publications. Dale Brown? "Oh yeah, let's pick every other book to publish." What idiot does that. If I'm going paperless then I'm going paperless.
DRM is tolerable but there's no reason you can't have an open format that supports DRM.
The people that dreamed up these different formats have done such a poor job it's not funny. PDB don't support different typefaces. PDF's don't reflow. HTML isn't going to support DRM and you need to zip to capture multiple files. Kindle isn't compatible with anybody else, lit is closed. While I find mobipocket tolerable try accurately converting any of the others to mobipocket. They're all just a kludge. Concepts of "paragraph", "chapter", "lists" and "Table" all are meaningless in these formats and essential concepts for reflowable layout. Basically, a quick experience in trying to convert formats and you will quickly understand that the people who designed these "formats" know nothing about capturing and encoding information.
Until they get a clue eBooks are dead in the water. (And I like mine, that should tell you something.)
Amazon wants Kindle to fail? (Score:4, Insightful)
Books are cheap in the U.S. and people have a lot of room to store them, so Kindle is definitely a niche product in its domestic market. However, in other countries books are expensive and often space is at a premium. Kindle offers huge advantages, and would be wildly successful in these markets.
How does Amazon respond to this market need? They refuse point blank to sell kindle devices or media to anyone outside North America.
Sure, whispernet is NA only. But a USB connection works just as well...
What sane company ignores its largest potential market? And when it does, the writing is on the wall. If I was a shareholder, I would be livid.
So the only question that remains is why Kindle is being set up for failure? Simple incompetence? Xenophobia? Or something more subtle?
Re:uhhh (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm normally among the first to smell a Treacherous Computing/Digital Restrictions Management dystopia, but can't "e-paper" be photocopied or scanned? I'm picturing a solenoid or two and a short program that synchronizes the "next page" button with the "scan/copy" button here.