Originally posted at TeleRead.com on February 20, 2009By Stephen Windwalker, with apologies to songwriters Don Robertson and Howard Barnes and artists Elvis Presley, Eddy Arnold, Les Paul and Mary Ford for the title of this post
Even if I had never been a guest on the show, I’m sure I would make a regular weekly routine of listening to Len Edgerly’s Friday Kindle Chronicles podcast. Today Len deserves kudos for landing and conducting an interview with Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, and for utilizing the wisdom of crowds (in this case his growing subscriber list) in developing his questions for the dialogue. The postcast ordinarily runs about 40 minutes, give or take, and I recommend it.
Len draws out Freed on a variety of topics that will in some cases be more interesting to actual Kindle owners than to those of us who seem to be called to an avocation of thinking and writing about all things Kindle and the wider world of e-readers and gadgetry, including:
* the possibility of a larger display for greater textbook compatibility;
* the reasons why Amazon has yet to respond directly to customer demands for user-defined content folders;
* Amazon’s commitment to continuing support for Kindle 1 owners;
* the Kindle Store’s effort to hold the line at a $9.99 price point for bestseller hardcover editions and new releases; and
* Freed’s favorite thing about the Kindle 2, which is that it is thinner, more comfortable to use, and appeals to his 13-year-old son.
But Freed also provides interesting tealeaves for us to read on three other topics that may help to frame our thoughts and speculation about the future of the Kindle and the world’s growing federation force of putative Kindle Killers. Two of these topics involve the Kindle’s free 3G web browser (made more user-friendly by hardware enhancements and wider connectivity areas) and another statement that Kindle compatibility with smart phones and other mobile devices is something that “we’re working on pretty aggressively. We are excited about offering it and it’s coming soon.”
But let me focus here for a moment or two on those elusive Kindle sales numbers.
On speculation about the possibility that Amazon might run out of the new Kindles on or soon after its February 24 release date, Freed sought to allay fears: “We’re in good shape. Orders are terrific. We’re really pleased with them, but we also are, I think, in a better position to understand what demand would be like, so we feel like things are going well.”
What interests me about these comments is that I think they make it possible to divine something about Kindle sales. Amazon’s ability to “understand what demand would be like” would be based, one would think, on past benchmarks. The company’s best period ever for Kindle sales came in the 10 days following Oprah’s October 24 endorsement, during which I believe that Amazon shipped about 100,000 Kindles. Now the company is approaching a release date on which it will ship all the Kindle 2 orders stirred up by the high-profile launch of the revamped device, as well as Kindle 2 shipments converted from the Kindle 1 backorders placed by well over 100,000 customers between mid-November and February 8.
So what do we think it means about the number of Kindle 2 units that will be shipped in a single day on February 24, if Freed “[understood] what demand would be like,” and feels that “orders are terrific?” The most conservative figure I can force myself to extrapolate from this limited data and other research I have conducted is in the ballpark of a quarter million Kindles shipped on a single day. More likely, I think, is a figure roughly twice that high.
We’ll never find out, of course. Or will we?
We’ve all seen that Amazon is as loathe to divulge quarterly or annual Kindle sales figures as it is to release internal benchmark figures from any sector of its business. However, the company does seem to enjoy teasing us from time to time with very specific numbers that are more of a snapshot nature and cannot be used to glean much in the way of bottom-line performance analysis. Information that the company has provided in the past about its raw numbers of holiday orders or the number of release-date Harry Potter books shipped falls into that category.
So wouldn’t it be fitting for Freed, Jeff Bezos, or the company’s press office to share a snippet of information about Kindle 2 release-date shipments, sometime between February 25 and the company’s first-quarter conference call in late April? They could tell us that X number of units had been shipped that day, or that more units had been shipped than in the entire history of Kindle 1, or that the total top-line revenue from the release-date shipments made it the single biggest day, in dollars, in Amazon history. They could tell us any or all of these things, or anything else that they wanted to tell us, or nothing.
For pros like Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney, any such information would be fodder for some further serious spreadsheet engagement. For you and me, it might be fun, or not. For some on-the-fence prospective Kindle 2 buyers, it would be one more nudge to avoid being too, too late to the party. For book and periodical publishers and authors, it would be like placing a large and powerful magnet at the center of the Kindle Store catalogue. And for the manufacturers and sellers of all those putative Kindle Killers — who, I am convinced, are seen by Amazon more as prospective partners than as competitors — it might be an impetus to make deals that could, in the long run, be beneficial for Kindle owners and publishers.
We’ll see. And, of course, I have spread the window of time during which I speculate that Amazon could make such a pronouncement over a long enough period that I can hope, if nothing happens, that you will forget I said it.
About Stephen: He’s been writing about Amazon’s strategic innovations since his niche bestseller on online bookselling in 2002, and his Complete Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle was the top-selling title in the Kindle store for 17 weeks in 2008, but on advice from Amazon's attorneys Windwalker refuses to divulge how many books have been sold. Stephen is also publisher of A Kindle Home Page and the weekly Kindle Nation email newsletter, and his latest book, on the Kindle 2, is now available in the Kindle Store .
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