The Amazon Kindle - Product Of The Year 2009?
The amazon kindle must have been one of the most successful products of 2009. Amazon released the Kindle 2.0 and the larger DX version in February and June of 2009. They seemed to create quite a stir and there was a huge amount of publicity regarding the impact that e-book readers were going to have on the way we read books.
Even the normally conservative world of academic publishing got in a bit of a flutter - mainly focused around the DX which, being larger was better suited to reading the content of many academic textbooks. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California would move to free electronic textbooks - starting in August of 2009! This wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky vision of the future, this was really happening.
Around about the same time, the New Democratic Leadership Council - which has Hilary Clinton as a member - published a position paper entitled “A Kindle In Every Backpack”, which waxed lyrical about the possible educational benefits of using e-book readers and e-books in our educational system.
And there was plenty of other publicity for Amazon. Don’t forget, Oprah Winfrey loves her Kindle (and has done for quite some time now). Bestselling author Stephen King even wrote a special novella - Ur - to mark the release of the Kindle 2.0.
The Kindle became Amazon’s best selling product, which just goes to show what a great fit it is for Amazon’s business model. They are, after all, the world’s largest book sellers and they also have a strong link with electronic products - admittedly as a merchant rather than a manufacturer, but the Kindle certainly changed all that.
2010 will be an even better year for the Kindle. Despite the large number of manufacturers rushing out their own readers, Amazon will continue to dominate the market for some time to come.
Related:
E-book readers were very much the hot "must have" gadget of 2009 - and none more so than the Amazon Kindle reader which became not only Amazon's number one product but also the "most gifted" Amazon product ever over the 2009 festive period. Amazon has dominated, and to a certain extent...
E-book readers were very definitely the hot electronic gadget of 2009. Amazon updated its kindle reader releasing first the Kindle 2.0 in February and then following up in June with the larger display Kindle DX. Both these launches attracted a lot of publicity for e-book readers and other manufacturers either released...
One of the big things in the personal electronics market these days is "fusion" products - devices which do more than one thing. The iPod is a very good example. It's a phone and it plays mp3 music files. You can play games on it, surf the web on it...