October 26, 2010

Amazon’s numbers game

by

The folks over at Media Post have posted a question that I myself have wondered about on many occasions:

If the Kindle is selling so well, why doesn’t Amazon back up its boasting with some actual dollar or unit sales instead of leaving analysts and everyone else to guess? It is a publicly traded company after all. Consider Apple, not known for a corporate culture dedicated to transparency, regularly discloses unit sales for devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod. That’s what hardware companies are supposed to do.

Once again, Amazon is bragging about their Kindle sales yet offering no substantiation. Media Post reports Amazon announced that the “sales of the new generation of lower-priced Kindle devices introduced in July had already outpaced total Kindle sales for the fourth quarter of 2009.” They continue:

Obviously, cutting the price of the basic model to $139 and the 3G version to $189 has helped boost sales. Amazon threw out some other benchmarks highlighting the health of its digital book business: Kindle sales continue to outpace print book sales, at a rate of 2 to 1 for bestselling titles; e-book sales in the first eight months of 2010 grew faster than the 193% growth rate for the industry as a whole; and the company sold three times as many e-books in the first nine months of the year than the same period a year ago.

Problem is, nobody know exactly how many eReaders this represents. And Amazon isn’t telling. Apple says they sold 4 million iPad’s this last quarter. Something tells me, that’s more than the Kindle….

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

  • http://www.marionstein.net Marion

    But it’s not only the numbers on the Kindle that Amazon is fuzzy about. It’s the number of Kindle books being sold. And while Amazon now makes a distinction between “selling” “paid” and “free” content, it’s still a blurry line with some switching and getting on different lists. Plus with a list divided into “paid” and “free” and so many possible sub-categories, it doesn’t take more than occasional sale to get onto a “bestselling” “top 100″ list in something. The Kindle Store — kind of like the Special Olympics for writers.

  • http://www.marionstein.net Marion

    But it’s not only the numbers on the Kindle that Amazon is fuzzy about. It’s the number of Kindle books being sold. And while Amazon now makes a distinction between “selling” “paid” and “free” content, it’s still a blurry line with some switching and getting on different lists. Plus with a list divided into “paid” and “free” and so many possible sub-categories, it doesn’t take more than occasional sale to get onto a “bestselling” “top 100″ list in something. The Kindle Store — kind of like the Special Olympics for writers.

  • Patrick Murtha

    The whole “e-book phenomenon” feels weird to me, because all of my friends are part of bookish culture, and yet no one I know owns a Kindle or any other e-book reader. Not one single person. Nor have I *ever* seen a person using one. I have been suspecting for a long time that a lot of the statistics we’re reading about e-book sales and e-book reader sales are completely, utterly fraudulent, designed to make us feel that we are missing out on the “next big thing.” I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I’m crying foul here. Something is not right.

  • Patrick Murtha

    The whole “e-book phenomenon” feels weird to me, because all of my friends are part of bookish culture, and yet no one I know owns a Kindle or any other e-book reader. Not one single person. Nor have I *ever* seen a person using one. I have been suspecting for a long time that a lot of the statistics we’re reading about e-book sales and e-book reader sales are completely, utterly fraudulent, designed to make us feel that we are missing out on the “next big thing.” I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I’m crying foul here. Something is not right.

Stories from related categories