Can Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader ever make the mainstream?
Photo by jblyberg on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Amazon's shareholders will hope so - its stock rose 8% yesterday off the back of an estimate by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahoney, who said sales will reach 380,000 by the end of this year. That's up from the original forecast of 190,000 and, though dwarfed by mobile and games console sales, is a very respectable figure for a relatively niche, high-end product. Similar in proposition, in fact, to the iPod, which debuted with similar figures.
The line the investors liked was this one: ""Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," he said, predicting Amazon's Kindle revenue would top $1bn by 2010.
I've yet to lay my hands on one of these but when I saw one briefly, I was pretty impressed by how small it was. I'm less convinced about the subscription-access model to content, but then if there's money in them there hills, it makes sense, in this climate, to pursue that. Especially when there's a billion in revenue as a result.
Any user experiences?
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