Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, a Next Craze?

The first disadvantage that comes to one’s mind with today's ebook readers is the price as the hardware can easily range up to £400. Although there was a $40 price cut this year Amazon's ebook reader, the Kindle, is still quite expensive at $359. There are few those who buy enough books to make up for the high the cost as Guardian.co.uk. justly points out. A view that many share these days is that the chance for the Kindle would lie in being able to replace a printed newspaper (this way it would be easier for regular readers to recover the hardware cost).

Guardian.co.uk throws in some numbers comparing the success of different consumer electronics devices:

However, the Kindle has done very well by ebook standards, and Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney has just doubled his projections for Kindle sales to 378,000 units for this year, 934,000 next year and 4.4m in 2010. "Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," he told Citigroup clients.

The numbers are small compared to other consumer electronics devices. For comparison, Apple sold around 8.2m iPods in the US in last year's Christmas quarter, Nintendo's Wii sold 2.9m and Microsoft's Xbox 360 2.4m. Mahaney's estimate of Kindle sales is exactly the same as the iPod sold in its first year. However, the iPod entered a market that had been pioneered by devices such as the Diamond Rio, and the huge success of Napster's file-sharing service meant there was plenty of free content. Amazon is having to create the market itself.

Unlike the always-ready-to-sue Recording Industry Association of America - which tried to bring to an end the sales of the Rio player by filing a lawsuit, newspapers will probably take on another strategy and support the ebook readers. When will that happen it’s still far from being a certainty.