Editor, Kindle Nation Daily
December 3, 2010
Okay, let’s be clear: I don’t want you to spend any money that you are not already planning to spend this holiday season.
But if you are planning to buy Kindles as stocking stuffers for your loved ones in the next few months, you might not want to wait.
Here’s why: Oprah.
This coming Monday, December 6, Oprah will air another twist on her “My Favorite Things” series, on which she gives out a free Kindle to every member of the audience.
It will be a very big show, in part because she will also be announcing the new selection — #65 — for her Oprah’s Book Club. More about that later.
As of today, all three Kindles: the $189 graphite Kindle 3G
, the $189 white Kindle 3G
, the $139 wifi-only Kindle
, and the $379 Kindle DX
are all in stock at Amazon. So far, so good.
, the $189 white Kindle 3G, the $139 wifi-only Kindle, and the $379 Kindle DX are all in stock at Amazon. So far, so good. 
But this is where it is important to recall the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952), who said that “those who cannot remember the last Oprah endorsement of the Kindle are condemned to receive their holiday Kindle orders in February.” (My own Spanish is not good, so it is possible I have mangled this quotation.)
What Santayana may have been referring to, of course, is the history that immediately followed Oprah’s last “My Favorite Things” endorsement and give-away of the Kindle on October 24, 2008. Amazon shipped approximately 100,000 units of the Kindle 1 per day over the following week and ran out of the Kindle1 for good on November 1. The Kindle was not “in stock” again until February 23, 2009, when Amazon began shipping the Kindle 2.
Will Oprah’s Monday Kindlepalooza create a similar frenzy and backlog this December? I have no idea, and one hopes that Amazon has its production needs figured out and would not stoop to shortage-based stress marketing. But me? I will make a firm decision this weekend about who I’m buying Kindles for this December, and I will place my order Monday immediately after the show.Why Monday afternoon, and not immediately?
Once again, the reason is Oprah.
When she did her Kindle Love Fest show on October 24, 2008, she also announced a limited time deal where you could type in “OPRAHWINFREY” as a coupon code when you ordered your Kindle from Amazon and receive a $50 discount on the price (the list price at the time was $359 for a Kindle 1). And fifty bucks would pay for plenty of great Kindle books by Kindle nation sponsors like Terrence O’Brien
, Kitty Thomas
, and today’s sponsor Y.S. Pascal
. So maybe there will be a coupon and maybe there won’t.
, Kitty Thomas, and today’s sponsor Y.S. Pascal. So maybe there will be a coupon and maybe there won’t.
Fifty extra bucks would also allow you to pre-order, download or gift 6 copies of the book that will soon be #1 in the entire Kindle Store: the book to which we can only refer, for now, as Oprah’s Book Club Pick #65.
And that book is going to be a fascinating story over the next few weeks, above and beyond the actual content of the book that will show up on your Kindle home screen (or any other Kindle app) Tuesday if you click here and spend $7.99 to pre-order it. Here are a few reasons why, in addition to all the usual hoopla that always surrounds an Oprah pick:
- Penguin, the book’s publisher, has seriously broken ranks with its agency-model co-conspirators and priced the Kindle edition at $7.99. The paperback, which will be released Monday, is list-priced at $20 and discounted, by Amazon, to $13.60.
- If this is a signal that the agency-model publishers are returning to the kind of sane, common-sense pricing for Kindle editions and print books that these prices represent, it could provide an interesting footnote to a blog post by publishing insider Mike Shatzkin the other day, in which he declared that the most dramatic publishing event of the year has been the advent of the Agency Model. The footnote, of course, would note that 2010 was marked both by the birth and the imminent death of the Agency Model.
- In the far more likely event that this common-sense pricing scheme for Oprah Pick #65 is a one-off consequence of pro-reader jawboning by the estimable Ms. Winfrey, it would mark the second time that she had helped Jeff Bezos accomplish what he could not do alone. First, in October 2008, she brought the Kindle mainstream. And now, she would have touched an agency model publisher with the Sanity Wand and persuaded Penguin to price this book to sell, rather than to prop up the sales of its print counterpart.
- Either way, we should watch for two huge events in publishing history this month. First, supported by the logic of these prices, Kindle sales for Oprah Pick #65 will blow away Amazon’s own print edition sales. Second, overall ebook sales for Oprah Pick #65 will surpass all print sales for the book this month and create the beginning of the next dramatic sea change for ebooks, ebook readers, and the publishing and retail book trades.
What will hasten the coming of such a Kindle tipping point? There are more reasons than we have time for here, but here are three that stand out:
- The growing ubiquity of the Kindle and the other devices it has inspired. The percentage of active U.S. readers who own a Kindle, another ebook reader, or some other device on which they run the free Kindle app has been blowing through all the benchmarks that observers had pegged for the middle of this decade and could well, by the end of this year be as high as one-third.
- The prices, of course. There was a reason the big dinosaur publishers launched the agency model, and it wasn’t because they wanted to be friends with Steve Jobs. They realized that print-edition sales were headed for disastrous declines unless they forced dramatic increases in Kindle prices. But that play has not worked, so now if the publishers bring new-release Kindle edition list prices back down to the$8-$10 range where they belong the momentum of the Kindle revolution will be even greater.
- This Oprah Pick #65 launch will provide the perfect testing ground for Amazon’s not-so-secret weapon, a new gifting feature for the Kindle. There will be thousands of Kindle enthusiasts who make use of the incredibly friction-free new Kindle gifting button — think Amazon gift certificates, but with your choice of the actual gift — to send a virtual stocking stuffer to friends, loved ones, colleagues, and others in the next few weeks. The gifting button will show up next to Oprah Pick #65 Monday or Tuesday, and the book will show up soon thereafter in an Amazon press release as the most gifted Kindle book of the year.
