Why The Kindle Reader Is Ahead Of The Field

Amazon’s Kindle book reader product for Amazon. Bearing in mind that Amazon has such a strong association with both books and electronics the Kindle fits in really well with Amazon’s business model.

Over the course of 2009, e-book readers as a whole, and especially the Kindle, became the cool “must have” gadgets of the year. All the signs are that sales will keep growing at a very rapid rate throughout 2010. The market is still in its infancy and is changing and developing at lightning speed.

Right now, the Kindle is the market leader by a long way. It currently enjoys an impressive 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market. Sony is in second place with a creditable 35% market share. There is a long list of competing manufacturers who have now developed e-book readers of their own in order to get a piece of the action in what looks like being a large and lucrative market.

In a way, it’s a back-handed compliment to Amazon that virtually every new e-book reader that shows any promise is instantly hailed as the “Kindle Killer”. However, bearing in mind that the Kindle is now Amazon’s number one selling product, you can be sure that Amazon will be fighting tooth and nail to hang on to the lead position.
Amazon has responded to the increased competition by reducing the ticket price of the Kindle 2.0 by $ 100 from its February launch price to $ 259. The price of the Kindle DX remains, for the moment at least, unchanged. There have also been firmware updates, including prolonged battery life and the addition of pdf support for the Kindle 2.0, among others.

Amazon has also now released both the Kindle 2.0 and the DX in over 100 countries around the world. In reality, Amazon could probably sell Kindles as fast as they can make them just in the USA – but establishing an international Kindle presence is probably a very smart move in the long term.

In addition to enhancing the Kindle reader itself and entering new markets, Amazon continues to expand the selection of Kindle books available on its Kindle store. There are currently more than 400,000 titles available – and this number is growing at an average rate of over 500 a day.

So, even although there are a huge number of manufacturers frantically developing e-book readers in order to grab a share of the market, Amazon is probably quietly confident. Rather than simply focusing on hardware development, Amazon is advancing on a broad front. They are improving the existing Kindle, adjusting prices, growing their market, increasing the choice of books on offer and generally capitalising on their market leadership position. When they decide to launch the Kindle 4 – sometime this year in all probability – they are going to consolidate their leadership position even more.

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