Amazon Kindle the Next iPod?
Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider wrote an article today about the potential of the Amazon Kindle to reach iPod-like status and become one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s revenue going forward.
While the current Kindle is not much to look at and is rather overpriced, it’s winning over skeptics who initially thought it wouldn’t work. Attributes like the ease of downloading books and the relatively low price of the books that are downloaded are convincing people that this could really be a phenomenon in the making.
Of course, like early versions of the iPod, people are waiting to see what the next generation Kindle looks like, and how much use early adopters get out of the product. But a healthy number of sales combined with an iTunes-like purchasing model could bring in as much as $750 million a year to Amazon by 2010, according to Mark Mahaney of Citi.
My question is, who is the Kindle buyer? MP3s and CD’s deliver the exact same product, but a book has an entirely different feel. Also, where do you use Kindle? Trains, buses, and airplanes, obviously, or other places where you’re waiting. Will the home reader use it? College students? iPod users can actually walk around or go to the gym with their product, and plug it into the car.
In fairness, it really is apples and oranges between the Kindle and iPod. I’ll admit that if I still lived in Brooklyn and had to ride the L train into the city every day, the Kindle would be pretty awesome. So there’s definitely a market for it, it’s just a matter of how big that market is and how comfortable people are saying good by to pages, ink, and binding.
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