Amazon recently confirmed that, during the month after the release of their third generation Kindle reader, they sold more Kindle readers than for the same time period following any previous Kindle reader launch. The new Kindle is, not simply in demand, it is the fastest selling Kindle to date. As usual, Amazon did not reveal the exact number of Kindles which were sold, but they did advise that, since the release of the new version of the Kindle, customers have bought more Kindles on Amazon.com and the newly opened Kindle store at Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product.

At the end of July, Amazon announced their new Kindle 3. The latest version packs the same 6″ display into a new slimmed down design which is 21% smaller and 15% lighter. Page turn speed is 20% faster and memory size has been boosted from 2GB to 4GB – sufficient to store 3,500 books. With the Wi-Fi turned off, the battery will now last for a month – even with the Wi-Fi on, a 10 day life is achievable – and the e-ink technology screen has had its contrast improved.

Amazon also introduced an entry level Wi-Fi only model, for customers who don’t anticipate the need for 3G. This sells for $ 139, with the 3G plus Wi-Fi model selling for $ 189. Those prices represent massive reductions on the previous $ 359 Kindle price. It’s a clear sign that the e-book reader market is entering a new phase.

During the first six months of 2010, Amazon sold three times as many Kindle books as they did during the same period of 2009. The number of books available on the Kindle store has now grown to over 670,000 titles – and that doesn’t include the 1.8 million free titles available.

The Kindle continues to be Amazon’s top selling item. It is also the most gifted and most wished for product on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. With the high sales figures of the Kindle and the latest technical improvements, it would be easy to overlook the importance of the launch of the UK Kindle store at Amazon.co.uk. The UK store has opened with 400,000 titles available and could increase international Kindle sales. If it proves to be successful – and early sales returns suggest that this will be the case – then Amazon may well open further Kindle stores in countries like Japan, France and Germany – all of whom have their own “local” Amazon websites.

Whilst Amazon still faces competition from the Apple iPad this doesn’t seem to concern them too much. The difference in price between the Kindle and the iPad is, for the moment at least, large enough to tip the scales in favour of the Kindle for most customers whose chief interest is in reading books. The sale of e-books will become increasingly important as the e-book reader market develops and matures. The fact that Kindle books are outselling iBooks by a ratio of sixty to one speaks volumes.

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.

This time last year, the e-book reader market was like the Wild West – or maybe the gold rush would be a more appropriate metaphor. Following the huge success which Amazon had achieved with its Kindle reader – first of all with the Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009 and then with the large display DX model in the summer of the same year – a small army of personal electronics firms seemed to be developing, releasing or updating e-book readers of their own in order to grab a share of the new and rapidly developing market.

Sony and Barnes and Noble were working feverishly to get their new readers to market in advance of the 2009 festive season and Plastic Logic, Asus and a number of others were rushing to get their readers released as quickly as they could manage. The Computer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas in early 2010, had a dedicated e-book reader section for the first time ever. E-book readers were a hot new emerging market.

However, just a few months later, it’s a very different scene. The price of e-book reader hardware has been in free fall. The latest third generation Kindle now has a Wi-Fi only entry level model available for only $ 139 – less than 40% of the $ 359 price which the Kindle 2.0 launched. The price of the Nook reader from Barnes and Noble has also been slashed to just $ 149 – and a further cut before the festive season arrives seems highly likely.

A number of e-book readers which were in development – including Plastic Logic’s Que – have been abandoned. The market seems to be entering a new phase in its development – and whether there is any place in it for pure electronics manufacturers or not is open to debate. The Amazon business model is very well suited to selling lower priced readers and making a profit on the subsequent sales of Kindle books. Barnes and Noble could employ a similar strategy – but whether or not they could make use of economies of scale in the same way that Amazon can is debatable.

Obviously the launch of the Apple iPad has been a major influence in all of this. It’s certain that the price of e-book readers would have trended downwards anyway – but the iPad’s launch certainly hastened things along a bit. However, considering that the third generation Kindles sold out almost immediately after launch – even today customers are facing a three to four week wait for their Kindles to ship – it doesn’t look like the iPad is the long awaited Kindle Killer that it was widely forecast to be.

Apart from the debate about e-ink displays being easier to read on than back-lit screens, there is – for the moment at least – enough daylight between the price of the Kindle and the price of even the entry level iPad to make the Kindle the more attractive option for anyone whose primary interest is reading books. The monthly connection fees for the iPad will also not be an attractive option for some customers.

It does appear that there is ample room in the market for both the Amazon Kindle and the iPad to co-exist – for the foreseeable future at least. Other manufacturers of e-book readers, including big players such as Barnes and Noble and Sony, may well find things tough as hardware prices keep dropping.

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle reader for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories on offer to help you personalise your reader.

There must have been a lot of internal debate about what to set the price of the Kindle e-book reader at when Amazon released the original way back in November of 2007. The Kindle wasn’t the first e-book reader on the market (not by a long way), but neither was the market mature enough to suggest a clear price point. They also had a variety of different pricing plans that could have worked.

They might have decided to go for a cell phone type of plan with the price of the hardware being heavily subsidised by regular monthly payments over a fixed contract length. Some intermediate arrangement with a charge to download books or surf the web might have also been a viable option. In the end, Amazon decided to charge the full price for the Kindle reader and to have no monthly fee – connection via 3G was included in the $ 359 selling price. Nor was there any fee for downloading Kindle books, it was pretty much an all inclusive package.

The Kindle was pretty well received – Oprah Winfrey declared it to be her “new favourite gadget” – but it didn’t exactly change the world. It was considered to be something of a work in progress – which is exactly what it was. It wasn’t until the launch of the Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009 that the e-book market really exploded. The Kindle 2.0 was also sold for $ 359 and the large display Kindle DX was released in the summer of 2009 with a price tag of $ 489.

The e-book reader market started to grow exponentially and it seemed that every electronic manufacturer had their own e-book reader in development. Companies such as Plastic Logic, Sony, Barnes and Noble, Bookeen and iRex fought to secure their share of the new and fast developing e-book market. The Kindle had a reported 60% share of the e-book reader market and was the standard to which other e-book reader manufacturers needed to aspire. It seemed that any reader which displayed the slightest potential was instantly christened the “Kindle killer” – but, in reality, the Kindle had no real credible competition.

However, the launch of Apple’s iPad changed the scene and, not for the first time, the death of the Kindle was widely predicted. However, and also not for the first time, rumours of the Kindle’s impending demise proved to be premature. The third generation Kindle was released in August of 2010 and sold like hot cakes. Shortly after the Kindle 3 launched Amazon were sold out of the new readers and prospective customers were faced with a four or five week wait before their new readers would ship.

In addition to all the usual good upgrades to the technical spec – more memory, faster page turns, smaller and lighter body, higher contrast screen etc. – Amazon launched a brand new entry level Wi-Fi only Kindle with a price of just $ 139. The price of the 3G plus Wi-Fi model was set at $ 189 – a big drop compared to the $ 359 price. More importantly perhaps, the new Kindles are considerably cheaper than even the entry level iPad – and there’s no monthly connection fee to pay.

Based on the evidence to date, it looks like the Kindle and the iPad can co-exist. Whether the same can be said for other e-book readers must be highly debatable. The big advantage that Amazon enjoys over some other e-book reader manufacturers is the fact that, being a book seller, it will be able to profit from the ongoing sale of e-books. If it wished, it could choose to support the cost of the hardware from e-book sales.

The e-book market is maturing very quickly. It seems obvious that hardware prices have still got some way to fall, and very possibly in the near future. Could we conceivably see Amazon, and maybe Barnes and Noble, making e-book readers available for free in an attempt to lock in future e-book sales? Is it to fanciful to suppose that customers who join Amazon’s premium delivery Prime club or who sign up for an Amazon credit card could find themselves taking receipt of a free, or at least heavily discounted, Kindle reader in the fairly near future? Time will tell.

Learn more about the Amazon Kindle reader for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise and protect your reader.

Amazon has been an important, quite possibly the most important, player in the development of digital publishing using both their Kindle reader family and their huge library of Kindle books as development and marketing tools. November 2007 saw the launch of the original Kindle. Amazon followed up with the upgraded Kindle 2.0 in February of 2009, and the large display Kindle DX model launched in the summer of 2009.

With a market share of 60% of all e-book readers sold in the USA, the Kindle readers dominated the market. Sony trailed in second place with a still respectable 35% share. Needless to say, other electronics manufacturers quickly saw the potential in the nascent e-book reader market and either developed or updated their own readers.

Manufacturers like Bookeen, Plastic Logic, Sony and Barnes and Noble worked hard to get their share of the rapidly developing market, but the dominance of the Kindle seemed pretty well established, if not unassailable. It was only when Apple launched their iPad that the Kindle faced any credible competition – despite the fact that the two devices were very different and, you would think, aimed at different target markets.

Nevertheless, since the release of the iPad, e-book reader prices have pretty much gone into free fall. The Kindle 2.0, which retailed for $ 359 at its February 2009 launch is now priced at just $ 189. The Kindle DX, which has just had a mini makeover and now sports a new higher contrast screen, has had its price slashed from $ 489 to $ 379. Still a pricey piece of kit, but a lot cheaper than before and also way cheaper than even the entry level iPad (which also has a monthly connection fee associated with it). The price of the Barnes and Noble Nook reader has also dropped to just $ 199.

Whilst the price of e-book readers may be falling, the same cannot be said about the price of the e-books which these devices are used to read. Again, Apple had a hand in this. Apple had, in advance of the launch of the iPad, set up their own book store and negotiated a pricing deal with the major publishing houses which basically allowed them to fix the price of their e-book editions at whatever level they wished. The only rider being that they could not offer the same e-book version at a lower price on any other platform. This effectively put paid to Amazon’s policy of pricing e-books at $ 9.99 or lower and was very popular amongst the publishing companies.

Amazon may have had to abandon their low e-book price policy – but that wasn’t necessarily a disaster for them. Considering the way that Amazon have made it possible to read Kindle books on such a wide variety of different devices – you can use the PC, the Mac, the iPod Touch, the iPhone, the iPad, your Blackberry and any device which runs Android to read Kindle books right now (and no doubt there will be further additions in future) – it must be obvious that Amazon are more interested in book sales than hardware sales. The latest downward price movement for e-book readers and simultaneous price increase for e-books means that they can now sell the hardware for less and make their profit by selling e-books over the life of the hardware. The same will apply for Barnes and Noble and Apple themselves of course.

This trend may tend to favor companies which have a foot in both the book and hardware sales camps. Considering the current number of devices which can be used to read Kindle books, it looks as if Amazon will be a major player in the future of digital publishing for some time to come.

Check out the Amazon Kindle for yourself and view the wide range of Kindle accessories available to help you personalise your reader.