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According to YouGov, 1.3m e-readers were sold in the UK this Christmas; 92% of them Kindles. 640,000 tablets were sold; 72% of them iPads. In the US c4 -5m Kindle Fires were sold. Morgan Keegan was quoted in The Times today suggesting that the Fire took away 1-2m iPad sales.
What’s for sure is that we are in the midst of an e-reader/tablet explosion. Practically everyone I know either got one for Xmas or was an owner already. The Fire will be ‘good enough’ as a tablet for many people. Certainly as a kids’ tablet it is ideal – at least if they wreck it, at $199 it is not the end-of-the-world.
For Amazon, these figures are magic as they point to an explosion of e-books downloaded from their Kindle site into the future. As the Kindle is clearly very ‘Amazon-friendly’, it will spur other sales and apps from their site too. Not quite such good news for Google. Although the Fire is Android-based, it is an ‘Amazonised’ version. This means that Google is locked out from benefits like its own apps store. Many suggest that Apple is readying a lower cost iPad to compete with the Fire. Whatever, Apple will be happy to stay in the high margin sector of the market. Amazon is reputed to make a loss on every Fire sold.
We also see all this spurring the BYOT trend. Why not board papers etc on your Kindle? After all, that’s the trend on the iPad.
