Kindle News: Clues that new e-Ink Kindles MAY be coming?

A set of observations on Kindle product page wording from commenter Blackbeard Blackbeard sent me a few days ago a couple of observations that he's given me permission to quote:

  1.  ' Right now the Kindle Touch is "Expected to ship in 1 to 2 weeks"
          [AB Note: Today, it's showing "Expected to ship in 4 to 7 days."

  2.  the Kindle Touch 3g is "Currently unavailable, we don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

  This is highly unusual, and it looks like they've drawn down stock prior to a new release. Keep a lookout!'

Yes, considering that Jeff Bezos said quite a lot, in his interview last week with Len Edgerly [transcript], about the attractions of the 3G models of the Kindle (and added that people who own these seem to read the most, according to their stats), this language about not knowing When or If the Kindle Touch 3G will be back in stock is VERY odd.

  The "currently unavailable" detail given is one of the pre-set reasons when an item is not in stock and it could have been just a programming error that it was showing up that way, but it still is showing that way today, 3 days later.

  Amazon is notorious for not being willing to say anything about a forthcoming model.   So, what's the story here?

  I wouldn't want to say something that could hurt Amazon sales while being untrue, but that statement on their product page is just glaring.

  The WiFi version that is expected be shipped in 4-7 days suggests at least limited supplies with re-ordering of another batch but that would also seem to be very conservative ordering of a high-volume item.

CNet's David Carnoy adds another indication
  In the meantime, CNet's David Carnoy, who has in the past received early word from Amazon though not currently, points out today that Amazon is offering Basic Kindles (the non-touch/no-keyboard model) for $47 (a 40% discount) to Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card holders, although they're limited to one promo code per customer and the offer comes with the disclaimer that limited quantities are available.
  Here's the Amazon page showing the offer.

When we remember the earlier rumor from DigiTimes that an announcement was planned around July 31, and this did not happen, it would seem an obscured announcement :-).

Carnoy writes, cautiously, that the $47 price for Basic Kindles, even if only for Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card holders, "would seem to indicate that Amazon is starting to clear stock to make room for new models."

Are thse unfounded rumors in this case? Or found indicators? :-)


(Bear in mind that if one has bought a Kindle, Amazon has a 30-day full refund period if not wanting it for any reason.)

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US: Kindle Fire  7" tablet - $199 Kindle NoTouch ("Kindle") - $79/$109 Kindle Touch, WiFi - $99/$139 Kindle Touch, 3G/WiFi - $149/$189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189, Free, slow web Kindle DX - $379, Free, slow web

UK: Kindle Basic, NoTouch - £89 Kindle Touch WiFi, UK - £109 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi, UK - £169 Kindle Keyboard 3G, UK - £149   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

OTHER International Kindle NoTouch Basic - $109 Kindle Touch WiFi - $139 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi - $189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

  For daily free ebooks, check the following links:

Temporarily-free books - Non-classics USA: by:    Publication Date      Bestselling   High-ratings UK: PubDate   Popular The Kindle Daily Deal What is 3G? and "WiFi"?       Battery Care Highly-rated under $1,  Newest: $1-$2, $2-$3

Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):    Top 100 free UK-Only:    Top 100 free USEFUL for your Kindle Keyboard(U.S. only, currently):   99c Notepad 1.1,   99c Calculator,   99c Calendar,   99c Converter

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Beware amazing media misintepretations

This google search will show how a few media-styled sites misread the CNET story on Amazon items sold on December 14, including this one by The Tech Herald [since corrected /Update 12/29/09] just tweeted within the last hour.  Other sites have picked up the misinterpretation (whoever started it), replacing Amazon "items" sold with "Kindle units" or 'Kindles' or "devices" (!), actually writing that they sold 9.5 million Kindles in one day and therefore "110 units per second"... and then it showed up on Twitter.

  Here's what CNET actually wrote:

' In another milestone for the e-reader, the company noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn't offer specific numbers for either category.

The peak shopping day for the online retailer was December 14, when customers ordered more than 9.5 million items worldwide, "a record-breaking 110 items per second."

Among those items bought between November 15 and December 19, the top electronics, following the Kindle, were Apple's iPod Touch 8GB and the Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS. '

This happens sometimes in a less obvious way though.  I guess the deadlines come too fast and maybe holiday cheer gets in the mix, but I was surprised to see this rather optimistic  :-)  figure repeated by others. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Amazon and Kindle's "Lost Symbol" get a rise

Amazon was trading up 7.4%, after Bank of America upgraded the stock to Buy, on the day that the Kindle edition of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol outsold the hard-cover novel at Amazon - the day of the novel's release.  Some think that Kindle sales might be contributing to the gains.

It was Kindle Nation Daily's Stephen Windwalker who noticed that despite Amazon's not breaking out the figures for Kindle and hardcover editions, the category of "Mysteries & Thriller" was showing the Kindle version as #1 in its "Bestsellers" listing -- and in fact, it still is, on Day 3.

WHY
The Bestseller listings tell you how fast-selling a book or edition is during the last hour or so, and the rankings can change quite a bit within an hour.
  On the Kindle's side was the fact that the hardcover version had been on the bestseller list for 149 days and had caught most of its crowd while this was the first day for the Kindle and after Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group only recently finally decided to issue Brown's book on the Kindle at the same time, despite worries it would cannibalize hardcover sales.
  The publishers of the Ted Kennedy book have decided not to offer that book for the Kindle and I feel they are just in denial.

Windwalker also pointed out that Bezos was looking ahead when he made the Amazon books buyable via the iPhone and iPod apps -- there are a lot of them out there, and people paying $70/mo. plus tax and fees for monthly access that includes web data access (iPhone users) likely want and can afford things now AND might even get the hardcover version if they like a book.

  As it is, the Kindle forums now include many iPhone/iPod users who enjoy their iPhone reading but want the Kindle also for the larger screen and the lack of light shining into the eyes.  There's a bit of a symbiotic relationship occurring, as Kindle users are also getting iPhones to have smaller reading carriers when out and about.  Amazon allows the devices to be "synched" via wireless so that you can close a book and then open it, to the same page, on the other device.

 Despite Steve Jobs' feeling that people generally don't read anymore the way they used to, the Apple devices have been acting as training wheels or drivers for the often-lost book-reading habit in a short-concentration-span world.  In Kindle, Sony, and Apple forums, customers are saying they're now reading more than they have in years.  Hardware companies are aware of this new interest and are fighting to get the next e-reader out there as fast as possible in every size and color they can.

Add that e-books will generally be less costly to produce and therefore less expensive to buy and that there is no wait for shipping, which can take days.

  If people experience an unexpected pleasure in reading from e-readers, as is regularly reported in the e-reader forums, what we've seen is not surprising.


THIS IS ALL RELATIVE
The figures discussed don't include sales from other stores, with print-book stats coming in later as a rule from most places.   It's just that few ever expected Kindle sales would do so well on a much-watched book release.

  Many prefer to carry reading sets on these reading devices (the library feature) while also enjoying the ability to increase or decrease the font sizes as wanted, or the spacing between lines and size of margins - not dependent on what the publisher set in place for for buyers.  People can get used to being able to just search/look up a name or event while reading and having a dictionary definition on the status line for each word.

  With the Kindle, they can furthermore get used to getting on Google to look up more web information on a word or phrase.


E-BOOKS VS HARDCOVER BOOKS
I think most Kindle owners still also want hardcover books when really valuing one just read and will want to have a physical copy of it.  It's true for me too.
  And there is no way e-book readers today, using e-ink's b&w, can begin to compete with hardcover books when photographs, diagrams, other illstrations, maps, etc., are an important part of the book.

  I read online columns constantly and there is a steadily increasing number of columnists who say they resisted using an e-reader for all the usual reasons and are surprised by how much they enjoy using their Kindles or Sonys, and many are now reading on iPhones or iPods on the way to work.  This is inevitably a bigger market over the next two years, even if only maybe 7% of the total now, generally.


The New York Times received a more thorough response than other papers did from Amazon's Andrew Herdener.

' “The big surprise was that, despite sustained, strong physical books sales, yesterday we saw the Kindle edition outsell hardcover editions on the book’s release day,” wrote Andrew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, in an e-mail message.

  He added, however, that the numbers did not include pre-orders of the hardcover, which had pushed the title to No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list more than a week before its release Sept. 15. '

  Nevertheless, the fact that Kindle sales were better on the release date than print sales, at Amazon, is quite newsworthy.  Grumpy critics of the idea that so many Kindle copies could be sold, when they feel there are not that many Kindles out there, forgot about the iPhone/iPod factor and are usually unaware of how intense the buying of books is with people with e-readers nowadays.

  The sudden outpouring of e-reader devices based on the innovative success of the Kindle and now e-book figures this high for a few days at Amazon, are meaningful precisely because the e-reader flood has only just begun and less fully-featured models are coming out for $160-$200 without wireless or study tools - to be used for just reading ;-)  Will they sell?  Probably.


E-BOOK SALES ELSEWHERE
Publishers Weekly has some interesting e-book stats:

" Shortcovers, the e-book service from Indigo Books & Music, said one-day e-book sales of the title have already surpassed total sales of the Twilight series that Shortcovers has been selling for six weeks and which had been its bestselling e-books.

  Total e-books sales Tuesday at Shortcovers were twice as big as the previous top-selling day.  Shortcovers said most purchases were made on the Web, and provided the following breakdown of mobile purchases by platform: 37% iPhone, 31% Palm Pre, 29% Blackberry, 3% Android. "

MURDOCH GETS A SURPRISE
paidContent.org reported, as did every newspaper the other day, on Robert Murdoch's grouchy regular announcements of intent to charge for mobile access on the Blackberry and iPhone, maybe in a few months.

 He is still complaining that the other big cheese, Jeff Bezos, takes too much for his publications (said to be 70% but insiders reporting elsewhere have said that 33% goes to the wireless provider, 33% for Amazon, 33% for Murdoch).
  Wireless is not a small part of the daily or several-times-a-day subscriptions.

His surprise:  Amazon gets him more paid subscribers than he expected.

' As for the Kindle, Murdoch said it’s wonderful for books, but pretty terrible for newspapers.
  But he seemed glad and a bit surprised that over 25,000 users have decided to subscribe to the WSJ on the Kindle. '

He plans to get behind Sony, who will give him a better deal, he says, although their implementation of cellular wireless will be only to the Sony store, making it less attractive for the $100 additional cost over the Kindle 2, similar in size.


A SHIFT IN ONLINE REACTIONS AGAINST E-READERS?
I read a rather extreme article by The Telegraph (UK)'s Andrew Keen titled
  "Ebooks will make authors soulless, just like their product"

 Well.  What intrigued me was not the article but the reaction.  Let's just say that Keen cannot be pleased.  People make interesting points on many aspects of the issue, but the overriding sentiment is not with his thinking.  A year ago, reactions tended to be the opposite - most comments I read back then were from people who could not comprehend why anyone would spend that much money just to "read a book" and could be quite hostile to the idea that people did not just go get a book free at the library if they wanted to read. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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300,000 Kindle 2's sold since February 24

The Washington Post reports that "a source close to Amazon" says that Amazon has sold about 300,000 Kindle 2's "suggesting Amazon has made over $100 million in revenue from the sales of the $359 device alone this year.

The Kindle 1 probably sold between 400,000-500,000, by an estimate of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney


I'm adding a link to the full text of Jeff Bezos' 2008 annual letter to shareholders today.  It describes goals and plans for the future and includes this statement:

'Our pricing objective is to earn customer trust, not to optimize short-term profit dollars. We take it as an article of faith that pricing in this manner is the best way to grow our aggregate profit dollars over the long term. We may make less per item, but by consistently earning trust we will sell many more items. Therefore, we offer low prices across our entire product range'

May this include actually acknowledging, with respect and some interest in fixing a now known problem for -- not all, but -- too many customers:  the Kindle 2 screen-contrast issues that have been much discussed on Amazon forums and in the dominant online journals that cover electronics.  Also, Kindle users are resisting any Kindle book pricing for non-technical books above $9.99. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!