Kindle 2 Reviews measure up, Number doesn’t

Posted on April 21, 2009 by switch11

Kindle 2 Review Numbers don’t Measure Up

Let’s assume TechCrunch is right and 300K Kindle 2s have been sold.  At Amazon there are, as of April 21st 7:35 pm PST, 2,791 Kindle 2 reviews.

This leads to some really interesting numbers -

  1. Less than 1 out of every 100 Kindle 2 owners is leaving a review. That’s 0.93% of owners writing reviews.
  2. Taking TechCrunch’s 400K estimate for Kindle 1 sales, and adding in a 20% bonus for used Kindle 1 sales, we get 500K potential Kindle 1 reviewers.
  3. There are 7,687 Kindle 1 reviews which translates to 1.53% of owners writing reviews.

That means there are two possibilities -

  1. For some magical reason, Kindle 1 owners are 1.64 times more likely to write a review; OR 
  2. Perhaps the number of Kindle 2s sold is much less than 300K. Assuming identical ratios and 400K Kindle 1 sales (and 20% being re-sold), that’d mean 181.5K Kindle 2s sold.

My money’s on the 300K number being a bit too high.

Also, the poll we had showed that you guys feel (although the sample size is small) -

  1. 27% thought that less than 150K Kindle 2s have been sold.  
  2. 23% thought that around 200K Kindle 2s had been sold. 
  3. 46%% thought TechCrunch was right and 300K Kindle 2s had been sold.  

Kindle 2 Measures Up in Owner Satisfaction

Here are some more interesting Kindle 2 review Vs Kindle 1 review numbers -

  1. 7,687 Kindle 1 reviews Vs 2,791 Kindle 2 reviews.
  2. 59.6% of Kindle 1 reviews are 5-stars.  62% of Kindle 2 reviews are 5-star reviews. 
  3. 21.9% of Kindle 1 reviews are 4 stars. 19.6% of Kindle 2 reviews are 5-star reviews. 
  4. Basically 81.5% of Kindle 1 owners, and 81.6% of Kindle 2 owners seem to be pretty happy. That’s an eerily similar number.
  5. 18.1% of Kindle 2 reviews and 18.4% of Kindle 1 reviews are 3 stars or less.

When the number of Kindle 2 reviews was 748, weeding out reviews from non-owners had indicated that the number of satisfied Kindle 2 owners (5 or 4 stars) was 86%. So it’d not be a surprise if slightly more than 81.5% of K1 and K2 owners were happy.

For all the talk of -

  1. Kindle 2 being only Kindle 1.5. 
  2. Complaints and negative reviews because of the Text To Speech issue.  
  3. Problems with screen resolution. 

Exactly the same percentage of Kindle 2 owners are happy as K1 owners. This is really, really surprising to me.

If someone were crazy enough to actually filter the reviews for non-owners we might actually have the Kindle 2 come in first (because the Kindle 2 TTS being made optional resulted in a LOT of negative Kindle 2 reviews).

Filed under: reviews | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

How do I avoid Reviews from People who don’t own a Kindle?

Posted on January 22, 2008 by switch11

Well the answer is by using Jason’s site i.e.
http://www.kindlereport.com/real-owner-ratings/

“Are you tired of reading reviews from people who don’t own a Kindle or never even used one? As of last night 50.03% of Kindle reviews on Amazon are from people who have never even used a Kindle.

Real Owner Ratings is a feature on a new site that I created that filters through all Amazon Kindle Reviews from Amazon.com, and classifies them as reviews from: actual Kindle owners, people who have used a Kindle, and people who never used one. There are also some interesting statistics that the site is able to discover based on the data, like the percentage I just mentioned. This is all part of a feature exclusive to The Kindle Report using Amazon’s data. I created the site as a Kindle owner wanting to help others find correct information and be more informed. I had nothing to do with Amazon.

I have seen the anguish here. This gives more accurate product ratings than Amazon’s original rating. You can also filter the reviews so that you read only actual reviews from Kindle owners or users.

You can check it out at
http://www.kindlereport.com/real-owner-ratings/

Filed under: reviews | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Reviews of the Kindle

Posted on January 15, 2008 by switch11

Update: I’m glad to say that I now have the (shall i daresay) most well rounded post on Kindle pros, cons, details and things you want to know before making decisions and/or forming an opinion i.e. The Kindle Decision aka the $400 Question – Should I Buy a Kindle?. 

At first, I thought that Amazon would be the best source for Kindle Reviews.

however, after reading a bunch of different reviews I’m realizing that there are three main categories of feedback i.e.

  1. The Pros and things people love
  2. The Cons and things people don’t like
  3. Suggestions and improvements people want to see in the next Versions of the Kindle.

So I’m actually going to start adding notes on what are the best points mentioned in different blogs and then do round-ups.

Filed under: kindle, reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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