Amazon is giving its e-book reader another feverish marketing push. Now that the company's supply-channel woes have been licked, it's devoting a good chunk of its landing page to swaying buyers into purchasing the $399 gadget.
The leading online retailer is devoting the heart of its homepage this week to a promotional note from CEO Jeff Bezos. A snapshot of boxed Kindles on pallets in the Amazon warehouse accompanies the note, perhaps to appease the Doubting Thomas in the crowd who needs to see it to believe it.
The note then links to Bezos' annual letter to shareholders, where the Amazon chieftain spends the entirety of the annual report's opening salvo pimping the Kindle.
I can't blame "Bezos" for rallying around the Kindle. It is a potential game changer. If it takes off, Amazon has a meal ticket to cash in as the gateway to literary digital distribution. It can become to books what Apple has become to music -- a savior riding in on the promise of inventory-free media delivery.
Unfortunately, few know how close Kindle may be to reshaping the industry, because Amazon has been so tight-lipped about how briskly the device has been selling.
Although "bezos" love to talk about numbers when it comes to kindle, however these numbers can give us the actual success the kindle had witnessed. For example, The first batch sold out in 5 1/2 hours? That addresses the initial supply shortage, a problem that made the device disappear during the critical holiday shopping season.
There are now more than 110,000 titles available and that is great, but how about an actual sale number of those titles? Investors would feel cheated if Apple didn't update its shareholders on the iPod and iTunes milestones, and Apple is a company that keeps secrets close to its vest.
There are more than 2,000 customer reviews on Amazon? Great, but that, too, tells us very little. You don't have to buy a Kindle to post a review. That's obvious once you begin going through some of the posting. Many people state that they would love to have a kindle but still paying 400$ for such device is considered much.
There are more than 2,000 customer reviews on Amazon? Great, but that, too, tells us very little. You don't have to buy a Kindle to post a review. That's obvious once you begin going through some of the posting. Many people state that they would love to have a kindle but still paying 400$ for such device is considered much.
Perhaps more telling is that less than half of the Kindle reviewers have given the device Amazon's highest five-star rating. If these are the early adopters who didn't flinch at the $400 price tag, the reviews won't get much better until Amazon either improves the features or lowers the price.
Marny
