Amazonâs Kindle Fire is the Rodney Dangerfield of tablets: it gets no respect. Again, Tuesday, the online retail giant reinforced that image by announcing Thanksgiving Weekend sales of the Kindle were âmore than doubleâ those in 2011 â" but released no hard numbers.
Just how many Kindles â" such as the $129 Kindle Fire Amazon pushed during Cyber Monday â" were sold this year versus last year? Dunno. We have plenty of commercial spin, however. This yearâs Cyber Monday was the âbiggest day everâ for global Kindle sales. The Kindle Fire HD âis the most gifted and most wished forâ Amazon product worldwide, according to the companyâ¦
âCyber Monday was the biggest day ever for Kindle sales, and weâre looking forward to millions of customers opening new Kindles this holiday seasonâ, said Dave Limp, Vice President for Amazonâs Kindle, in a media release [1] today.
The generalities are enough to make your teeth ache.
Who is Amazon trying to convince?
Not Walmart, which recently yanked the Kindle .
Not Target, which dumped the Kindle even earlier.
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Perhaps itâs the kids â" no, wait, they put the Kindle below the iPad , in a recent survey of their wish lists.
TechCrunch calls Amazonâs announcement âfrustratingâ. [2]
Author Ingrid Lunded weighs in:
One one hand it appears to point to obvious popularity for the Kindle devices â" and how effective the combined machine of online marketplace+products can be â" it doesnât give enough clarity on how something like the Kindle Fire is performing.
The blog makes a great point about the Kindle being an online marketplace.
Jim Dalrymple of The Loop [3] Â writes:
How many exactly did they sell? Amazon wonât say. Could be they sold 10 Kindles between the two days, nobody knows for sure. Just more bullshit from Amazon.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently made the same point, telling reporters he considers the Kindle a pipeline through which his company can sell books, ebooks, music and more. In a rare comment that included facts, Bezos told a UK interviewer the Kindle is sold at-cost .
âSo it is break-even on the hardwareâ, he told the BBC in October.
Bezos could be considered the Silicon Valley version of Carl Sagan, the astronomer infamous for the phrase âbillions and billionsâ. The Amazon CEO often used âmillions and millionsâ to describe Kindle sales.
But as weâve noted, Bezosâ Amazon is also eerily like Apple. Moreover, the companyâs marketing department doesnât shy away from firing subtle pot shots at Appleâs direction, as evident in the anti-iPad homepage ad it pulled  shortly after.
Last yearâs Kindle ad, seen below, is another example of subtle anti-Apple advertising.
Like Appleâs iDevices, the family of Kindles are not seen as products sold in isolation, but part of a broader content-delivery system. The iPhone is connected to the App Store, which also connects to iTunes, which connects to Macs, which uses iCloud, which, well, you get the idea.
So, how many Kindles are sold is not as important as how many books, songs, apps were sold by the Kindle.
Does it honestly matter if Amazon never publicly reveals how many Kindles are sold?
Links
- ^ media release (phx.corporate-ir.net)
- ^ TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
- ^ The Loop (www.loopinsight.com)
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