Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Another week starts off with lots of news related to the Kindle, Amazon, and more -

Kindle and eReaders

1. SmashWords now supplies books to the Kindle Store – Independent Authors can get 42.5% of their book sales by using SmashWords (that’s what’s claimed).  
2. Nathan Bransford talks about Top 10 eBook Myths. It’s very well written and denies me the opportunity to poke fun at it – How disconcerting that all 10 points are sensible ones.
3. Lots of new eReaders debuting – Ditto, ECO, nReader, iRiver Story, ViewSonic VEB12. Is there really space for all of them?
4. Not much in terms of Black Friday deals yet – Check out the current Black Friday eReader Deals and Black Friday Book Deals.

Also -

1. It’s interesting to see that more news articles about the Kindle upgrade focus on the battery life increase than on the PDF support.
2. People have started referring to Nook as ‘the color eReader’. 
3. We need a ban on awkward capitalization (no ‘n’ nook, no enTourage eDGe) and using indecipherable suffixes and prefixes (no VEB12, no DX).

Bookstores in trouble

1. Barnes & Noble and Borders both announced atrocious results. It’s a good thing the Nook is selling – it’s B&N’s last great inappropriately named hope. 
2. B&N cut its forecasts due to, among other things, the high costs associated with accelerating Nook production schedule. High costs and they still couldn’t guarantee supply?
3. GigaOm blogs about it, including this gem from CEO Stephen Riggio -
   

   Barnes & Noble executives remain extremely bullish on the e-book and e-book reader category. “This will be a multibillion-dollar business for Barnes & Noble,” CEO Stephen Riggio said.

4. The B&N CEO also talked about something Publishers don’t i.e. as channels solidify into one or two channels Publishers will be marginalized -
   

   … the many barriers to entry facing new players … among them content acquisition and aggregation costs, rights management, …
    
   “Digital content is going to be a much-less fragmented business than selling [physical] books,”

5. Borders had store sales fall 12.1% at Borders Superstores and 7.2% in Waldenbooks stores.
6. Borders UK is about to go into administration – it has stopped taking customer orders on its website.

Three Distributors have also suspended supply to Borders UK over unpaid bills.

Amazon Vs WalMart

1. Apparently, Amazon Vs WalMart is spreading beyond $9 hardcover books. New York Times has an interesting article with this fascinating snippet -
   

   In the late 1990s, Amazon assembled at least some of its knowledge of retail supply chains by hiring away Wal-Mart employees. Wal-Mart sued, and the two companies settled privately.

2. Cramer on Mad Money went so far as to call Amazon Wal-Mart’s Giant Twin Sister and also an ‘underestimated’ stock. Well, apart from it being priced for perfection, it’s totally underestimated.

Wal-Mart might have $400 billion dollars of revenue (compared to $20 billion or so for Amazon) – However, Amazon has way more insight into user behavior. 

Will Kindle benefit from rivals being out of stock?

Obviously. The more interesting question is -

How much of an impact will the unavailability of the Nook and the Sony Reader Daily Edition have on Kindle sales?

There are so many possibilities –  

1. A ton of impact? Perhaps we’re talking 300,000-400,000 more Kindle sold. 
2. Some impact - A 100,000 more Kindles sold.  
3. Very little impact – 30,000-40,000 more Kindles sold.

My money is on 200,000 more Kindles sold due to the Kindle 2 being the last eReader standing.

Filed under: news Tagged: | kindle news