Amazon: close to 8 million Kindle readers shipped?

Analysts are expecting Amazon to ship a lot more Kindle readers this year, even though the American group still hasn’t released sales figures for their eReader.

Amazon has never provided sales guidance of their Kindle eBook reader, with the group happy to regularly state that sales are very good and up to expectations. Behind this game of charades, analysts were estimating that 5 million units would be shipped in 2010.

At the end of this year, it appears that this estimation may be too conservative, with close to 8 million units of the Kindle now believed to have been shipped, compared to 2.4 million in 2009.

Amazon remains well out in front of the eBook market in the United States compared to the competing Barnes & Noble and Sony. These estimations should also reassure the company after some quarters believed that the eReader market may have been cannibalized by tactile tablets which provide eBook functions in addition to colour and animation through their LCD screens.


The eReaders market continues to make ground
Dedicated readers use an e-paper display without rear lighting, leading to very thin products with a battery life running to a few weeks. Amazon for the moment remains attached to the e-paper display while their competitor Barnes & Noble has made the jump and is now offering a dedicated reader with a rear-lit colour LCD display.

But colour is also starting to arrive on e-paper. E Ink, the world’s number one provider of e-paper displays, has unveiled their own technology developed through their partnership with the Chinese Hanvon. Could we soon be seeing a new Kindle?

Jon Rubinstein, ex-CEO of Palm (which has now been merged into HP mobile) has also joined Amazon’s Board of Directors, which will provide the group with a new direction for mobile products.

Amazon’s strategy is built around access to a large range of eBooks’ thanks to mobile eBook reading applications for all major Smartphone platforms. This has largely helped in the growth of the eBook market.