Reports from BookExpo America, which was held this past weekend in LA, show that the Amazon Kindle generated a lot of discussion and some heat.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos noted that Kindle titles sold to date amount to about 6% of total book sales on Amazon (numbers, not dollars). Considering that Amazon sells almost 20% of all books sold in the US, those Kindle sales are pretty impressive. Certainly more than any other e-book format can claim.
Amazon also announced that the Kindle reader price had been cut $40 to $359. It still needs to come down a lot if they expect to significantly grow the market. But I suspect that is going to happen. And when the Kindle 2.0 is released (Bezos did not say when a new version might show up), look for used 1.0 units to show up on Amazon and eBay.
Bezos also insisted that Amazon’s Kindle customers have continued to buy just as many print books as before. In fact, he noted a 2.6% increase in overall quantity of book sales.
Probably the biggest push-back from attendees was that the number of available titles for the Kindle needs to increase significantly. Of course, much of that is beyond Amazon’s direct control. Simon & Schuster did announce that they would soon be adding thousands more titles to Amazon’s Kindle Store. Apparently, there are about 125,000 current Kindle titles.
Given Amazon’s recent bullying tactics, I can easily imagine Amazon telling its print book suppliers that they have to make all their titles available on the Kindle…or lose their buy buttons.
Hmmm…sound familiar?
