According to media reports published Wednesday, Amazon.com now believes it will ship more than eight million Kindle e-readers this year — about 60 percent more than the 4.8 to five million range forecast for 2010 by financial analysts. Earlier this month, the online retail giant observed that it has been seeing huge demand for its latest Kindle devices.
“In just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we’ve already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display,” Amazon noted. “In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009.”
According to iSuppli, however, e-readers from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com were priced over the summer at about the breakeven level with respect to their bill of materials and manufacturing costs. “With zero profits on their hardware, both these companies now hope to make their money in this market through the sale of e-books,” explained iSuppli director and principal analyst William Kidd.
Staying on Top
The ultimate goal for Amazon is to retain command of the digital-content side of the market, which is why the company has worked hard to enable Kindle books to be seamlessly read across multiple computing platforms. “Amazon has a larger inventory of e-books than anyone else, and Amazon really should account for at least 60 percent of e-books, possibly 70 percent,” noted Forrester Research Vice President James McQuivey earlier this year.
The market for a wide variety of digital publications is still in a relatively early stage of its growth. However, Forrester expects the revenue opportunity to rapidly expand from $966 million this year to $2.8 billion in 2015.
“We have plenty of room to grow beyond the seven percent” of U.S. consumers reading e-books today, McQuivey wrote in a blog. “More e-book readers…