Amazon.com says it’s temporarily sold out of the new 3G and Wi-Fi-only models of the online retailer’s new Kindle e-readers, which were announced just last week. Though the Kindle has been Amazon’s best-selling item for two years running, the company wasn’t prepared for the flood of orders for the new devices priced at $189 and $139.
Orders placed Tuesday are expected to ship on or before Sept. 4, with pre-orders coming in thereafter “prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis,” the company said on its web site. Amazon had previously announced a shipping date of Aug. 27 for the new e-readers.
Right now the Kindle is “killer affordable,” noted Forrester Research Vice President James McQuivey. “The price cuts are proof that Amazon intends to own the e-book business by dominating the e-reader business,” he said, and “we see no evidence that its strategy won’t work.”
Amazon’s Market Domination
Moreover, McQuivey believes Amazon has little to fear from Apple’s red-hot iPad, which also reads e-books — at least in the short run. “We’re so confident of the long ramp Amazon still has ahead of it that our latest e-reader forecast shows that for at least the next year, e-readers of all flavors will outnumber iPads in the U.S.,” he wrote in a blog last month.
A new Forrester survey indicates that more people want to buy an e-reader of any kind than want to buy an iPad this year, though the iPad has more likely buyers than any single e-reader. By 2012, however, Forrester forecasts tablet PCs will start to outnumber dedicated e-readers. “By 2015, we see the e-reader market starting to cap at just under 30 million U.S. adults,” with nearly all of them “people who read 2+ books a month,” McQuivey explained.
He disputed recent media reports about Barnes & Noble and Apple each…