Kindle Sales Booming – Possibly Double in 2010

The Kindle is one of those devices that answers a need, yet I don’t personally get excited about its success. I want to see something that is open-source, with an easy way to save content on some other media, what has been purchased. I suppose I am strange like that – I have the idea that when I pay for something, I should be able to have it for the rest of my life, otherwise it is a rental, and those rental terms should be disclosed. Has the digital revolution not made packrats of us all?

Thank goodness for Amazon, others aren’t as caring about the term of their rentals, because the sales are booming, though Amazon won’t tell anyone exactly how many Kindles have been ordered or sold.

A story on AllThingsD tells about a prediction from Forrester research concerning upcoming sales of the device -

Amazon won’t even tell us how many Kindles it has actually sold, so projecting how many it’s going to move in the future makes for particularly tough fortune-telling. But that doesn’t stop anyone from trying. The latest stab: Forrester thinks Jeff Bezos and company will move 600,000 newly discounted units this holiday season, and will have sold 1.8 million by the end of 2009.

Overall, Forrester predicts, U.S. consumers will have purchased 3 million e-readers by the end of this year. That’s a bump from the analyst shop’s earlier prediction of 2 million. It thinks Amazon (AMZN) will claim 60% of the market, with Sony (SNE) taking 35% and the rest going to also-rans like iRex.

and , later -

Forrester figures e-reader sales will double, to 6 million next year, pushed by media buzz along with the introduction of new devices, including the Apple (AAPL) wondertablet that everyone is convinced will show up, someday

Here in California, the Governator wanted to get schoolbooks put on a Kindle-like device for all secondary and higher schools, but met with considerable pushback. No doubt some of it was from regular publishers of school books, which has gotten to be a racket, with prices upwards of $200 for one medium size college text, as an example of the big dollars being made in standard publishing.

I would think that a market entry of a device with the ability to store on removable media, at a reasonable price, would do very well, allowing a manufacturer to make great sums of money, keeping margins low, yet making it up in volume.

It can’t be simply wishful thinking.

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The answers are so simple!

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