View From the Publishing Trenches

I don’t have a definitive answer to that questions, but I do have my suspicions.

First, a couple of recent items of interest concerning the Amazon Kindle:

In a MarketWatch report titled “Amazon’s Kindle could be next iPod, analyst says,” Dan Gallagher notes that Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney just doubled his forecast for Kindle sales this year to 380,000 units. He says:

This would match the number of sales for the iPod digital music player in its first year on the market, leading the analyst to predict that the Kindle “is becoming the iPod of the book world.”

Then TechCrunch, who had suggested earlier that Mahaney’s original estimates seemed too low, posted “Those Kindle Estimates Keep Going Up” in which Erick Schonfeld noted that even Mahaney’s latest higher forecast might be too low. He adds:

Mahaney notes how difficult it is to find out any information about Kindle sales because Amazon is still making relatively few of them and it is the only retail channel selling them.

I think all of this hype and careless forecasting begs the real questions.

Of the 240,000 Kindles shipped from the factory to Amazon, how many have actually been sold? Amazon’s not talking.

Has the recent very modest price cut for the Kindle device actually spurred sales? Again, Amazon is silent.

Are too many Kindle editions of books priced too high?

How many Kindles have you — or anyone else — actually seen being used beyond the confines of private homes? Now, compare that to the number of iPods seen within a few months of its introduction.

I have been tracking the sales of Kindle editions of our books against sales of the printed versions for the past almost eight months. Kindle sales have declined noticeably over the past few weeks, while print editions continue to sell at a steady pace.

I am beginning to think that Amazon has hit a marketing wall, due to a combination of factors:

• The Kindle itself is just too expensive for a device that can only do one thing and relies on a propriety delivery system and a very restrictive format.
• Kindle editions of books are priced too high.
• Potential Kindle buyers cannot see one in a store and experiment with it before forking over more than $300 and waiting a few days or a week to see if it was money well-spent.
• Early adopters do not usually reflect a device’s true market.

So, where does that leave the Kindle? I don’t know. I suppose time will tell. But here’s one last point to consider:

If the Kindle were the roaring success Amazon tries to make it seem, don’t you think they would be touting its real sales numbers (dollars and units) and the actual number of Kindle books sold from the rooftops (or, at least, the Internet equivalent of the rooftops)?

Something just doesn’t seem right in this whole scenario. Secrecy about sales usually indicates underperformance.

Update (5:00 pm, August 13): Just came across o’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog entry titled The Pitfalls of Publishing’s E-Reader Guessing Game, which brings up some additional points on this whole how-many-Kindles-have-been-sold issue. As Mac Slocum says, “…if a content provider cannot accurately gauge popularity, then the focus needs to elevate to a broader level of analysis…” Read on…