Editor of Kindle Nation Daily ©Kindle Nation Daily 2010
Results from the largest public survey ever of Kindle owners provides plenty of good news for Amazon and for authors and publishers who are able to make the changes necessary to catch and ride the ebook wave.
In 1,968 individual responses between August 14, 2010 and August 24, 2010, participants suggested in a variety of ways that the Kindle can be a future goldmine of increasing importance that will allow Amazon to deliver digital content and sell other products.
It all begins, of course, with ebooks, and that won’t change.
- She bought 19.6 print books (hardcover and paperback combined) a year before getting a Kindle.
- She currently buys 4.9 print books and 46.6 ebooks a year. Slightly over half of her ebook acquisitions are free or priced at less 99 cents.
- After subtracting those free and bargain books, her total book-buying volume is 26.8 books a year, including 21.95 paid ebooks and 4.85 new print books.
Due in large part to the Kindle, Amazon is also capturing an increasing slice of this “average” respondent’s overall book-buying pie. Of the 19.6 print books she was buying before she got her Kindle, retailers other than Amazon were responsible for 11.6, or nearly 60%. Now, retailers other than Amazon are accounting for fewer than one-third of the 4.9 print books she buys each year and less than 1% of the ebooks she buys.
There are indications that, if Amazon builds a future Kindle with enhancements so that it could serve as a delivery system for a wider array of digital content such as music, audiobooks, video, and games, large numbers of Kindle owners could come along for the ride.
88% already believe the Kindle provides “a superior experience” for reading books, but many respondents nonetheless are eager for a future-generation Kindle with a “non-reflective color touch screen that can be read in direct sunlight,” similar to the Mirasol technology for which Qualcomm is building a $2 billion manufacturing facility in China without specifying its partner. 31% said “I would love this” feature, 29% said they were “very interested,” and 28% said they were “somewhat interested.”
The Kindle already plays audiobooks and music files but Amazon has yet to enable streaming or direct downloads to the Kindle for such content. Amazon is developing an app store for the Kindle and recently hired Microsoft’s director of gaming platform strategy for an undisclosed mission.
If Amazon plans to connect to that potentially unbeatable multi-faceted revenue stream with a multimedia Kindle 4 early in 2011, the trick will be to do so without compromising that 88% “superior experience” rating that the Kindle is able to garner as a dedicated ebook reader. Stay tuned.
