Amazon Says Kindle Selling Better Than Expected
Feb 1st, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: General, iPods & Portable Media Players 
During Amazon’s Q4 2007 earnings call on January 30th, CEO Jeff Bezos had some interesting remarks about sales of the company’s Kindle portable book reader:
Kindle is, in terms of demand, outpacing our expectations, which is certainly something that we are very grateful for.
It’s also on the manufacturing side causing us to scramble. We’re working very hard to increase the number of units that we can build and supply per week, so that we can get back — our goal is to get into a situation as quickly as we can where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately. That’s the standard we want to hold ourselves to and we are working very hard to get there. We are super-excited by the very strong demand.
We’ve been skeptical about the Kindle, because of the platform’s relatively closed nature. The Internet is where people’s attention is moving, and the Kindle doesn’t make it easier to access Internet content or make it easy to publish content to the device via the Internet.
Nevertheless, demand for the Kindle is apparently more than Amazon was prepared to handle. Because Amazon isn’t providing any sales figures for the device, it’s impossible to tell if there’s large demand for the device or if Amazon is just struggling to ramp up production.
I’ll be happier if the kindle drops DRM, and I don’t own one yet, but the fact that it has a web browser built-in that allows you to access the internet from just about anywhere with no additional, recurring fees would kinda seem to me like it makes it easier to access Internet content. That’s its only distinguishing characteristic from the sony books, really. But that’s what makes it very cool.
Brian
You’ll want to find out more about the Kindle browser before you consider using it for Web browsing. Here’s TechCrunch’s take.