Santa Claus was extremely nice according to the statistics released by Amazon this holiday season. Jeff Bezos proudly announced that the Kindle was the most gifted item ever on Amazon! There were also more eBooks sold on Christmas Day than traditional books. In this case, it is only natural to assume that many newly minted Kindle owners went surfing for some of their favorite books that day while traditional sales were down due to the post holiday slump.
Being ever secretive about the Kindle, what Amazon fails to mention is how many, in numbers, were sold this holiday season. The press release did have enough information to roughly calculate how many 8 GB iPods were sold (enough to play continuous music for 442 years) which was the 2nd most gifted item. Based off this information, there were at least 275,000 iPods sold which implies even higher numbers for the Kindle.
History might well record this as the starting point of eBook domination. Most publishers have been planning for this paradigm shift for several years, yet most are probably still figuring out a business model to continue generating the same, or higher, revenues. As these devices get smaller, lighter, faster, and more paper-like, they will disrupt business models beyond book publishers and printers. How could your business be affected?
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