Jeff Bezos Keeps UK Kindle-Lovers In the Wilderness
Another Amazon quarterly earnings call today, and another big puff of smoke in the face of UK readers waiting for the wazzo Kindle e-book reader to launch over here.
It’s been 14 months since the Kindle was launched in the US, and we STILL haven’t seen a single one in British bookstores. Yet the closest that the denuded Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to saying anything about the future of the device in his recent earnings report was: “We had anticipated strong demand, and what we saw was stronger than that. So we are extremely grateful for that, and we will keep marching forward here.”
Ahem? No sales figures, no UK launch date, no confirmation of the Kindle 2 launch everyone expects on Feb. 9th, no nuthin?!
Maybe that’s because the person ‘grilling’ him for information was none other than Mark Maheney, the frothy Citi analyst who wet his pants when he read an unsubstantiated Techcrunch report about Kindle sales, and started predicting $1 billion revenues for the clunky device by 2010. Maheney, it’s time to sort out your Bezos man crush.
In any case, me thinks Bezos is probably suffering from similar symptoms: enraptured by a personal self apotheosis where he has cast himself as global digital guru for the literary world, he seems to believe the European reading public are willing to wait in awe for all eternity for the Kindle’s long overdue launch.
In the meantime, as Bad Idea’s editor Daniel Stacey discovered when researching this piece on the e-book market for Slate’s TheBigMoney.com, the iPhone has quietly emerged as the biggest e-book reader in Europe with 325,000 readers using the free Stanza e-book application to download novels. Question – do you think those 325,000 (and counting) European users are really going to want to go and buy another device to read their e-books on once they get used to using their iPhones? If not, it will be Amazon’s just punishment for taking the European literary market for granted.
Posted by Jonty Rhodes in Sci-tech | January 30, 2009 7:41PM |
February 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
missing a trick i reckon. i disagree with everyone – i think this ebooks business is going to be huge.
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
I’m not sold on the Kindle at all. It looks ugly as sin & God Knows where you’re supposed to keep the thing – in your outsized shirt pocket? Back of your jeans? Makes no sense to me.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:55 pm
e-books, like global warming and the end of the american century, are the future. neither good nor bad, just inevitable. doesn’t matter if you were sold on them – you probably weren’t sold on mobile phones the first time someone told you that you’d have that thing glued to your ear 24 hours a day for the rest of your life, and look where we are now
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I’d argue that mobile phones were actually much cooler when they first came out. Bring back the brick!