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Amazon must be absolutely delighted with the performance of its Kindle reader family in 2009. The Kindle 2.0 was launched in February and the large format DX followed shortly afterwards in June. The Kindle rapidly became Amazon’s number one selling product – even prior to the worldwide launch of the Kindle 2.0 in October.

By the end of 2009’s festive season, the Kindle had become Amazon’s “most gifted” product ever and, on Christmas day, Amazon sold more Kindle books than they did traditional printed volumes. Of course, that was probably due to all those lucky people who had received a Kindle as a Christmas gift. In all probability, having opened their gift and got the Kindle out of the box, new owners would want to try out their new reader. That would probably have involved connecting to the Amazon website and downloading a Kindle book or two.

Nevertheless, selling more Kindle books than paperbacks and hardbacks is still a significant milestone. Even if some maintain that the method of realing this was just a little artificial then, when you think about it, that simply emphasises just what a good fit the Kindle is for Amazon’s business model.

Needless to say, Amazon’s competitors have been enviously eyeing their success and taking steps to ensure that they secure a share of the new e-book reader market. The list of companies who currently have e-book readers in development reads like a role call of consumer electronics giants. Sony, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft are just a few of the competitors who will be slugging it out with Amazon in 2010. Not to overlook Barnes and Noble who have now entered the market with their new Nook reader.

A lot of the next generation readers will have features which will make the Kindle, in its current format at least, look somewhat dated. Touch screen controls, color displays and an industry standard e-book format which will allow users to lend e-books to friends and family or even to borrow books from participating lending libraries are just a few of the features which users can look forward to.

You can be sure that Amazon will not rest on its laurels while their competition enters the market which Amazon has worked so hard to develop. The present Kindles, although innovative only a few months ago, probably bear little resemblance to what e-book readers will be like in the near future. Amazon probably already has their next generation Kindle under development (the Kindle 4?) and, based upon the level of innovation and drive they have displayed so far, Amazon will be anticipating further success during 2010. Kindle users can look forward to an updated, enhanced Kindle packed with new features – probably in the first half of 2010.

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The first Amazon kindle ebook reader launched in November 2007. It sold out in five and a half hours and was then out of stock until April 2008. It’s probably reasonable to suppose that even Amazon was somewhat taken aback by the immediate success of the device.

The updated Amazon kindle 2 went on sale in late February of 2009 and it was widely believed to be a marked improvement on what was an already successful product. Included among a number of improvements were; improved battery life, faster page turning, a text-to-speech facility (it will read books to you) and space for around 1500 books in its onboard memory (albeit that the option to use a separate SD card, a design feature of the original kindle, was now removed).

A mere three months later, in May 2009, Amazon announced that its new Kindle DX would be shipping in June of this year. Most of the key features of the Kindle 2 are included in the DX, but it has a larger 9.7″ display, which includes automatic rotation from portrait to landscape mode. Also included, for the first time in the kindle range, is the ability to handle native pdf files without the need for translation.

The larger size of the kindle DX makes it ideally suited for reading magazines, newspapers and academic textbooks. A number of major newspapers announced – even before the DX went on sale – that they would offer discounted prices for the kindle to anyone signing up to annual subscriptions.

Amazon are keeping their cards pretty close to their chest – but it’s estimated that somewhere between $86 to $96 million of kindle reader sales were generated between November 2007 and August 2008. Don’t forget, that’s only for the reader itself – the sales of ebooks must be separately considered. Industry watchers are predicting that sales for the kindle (the reader device only) will reach $ 1.6 billion by 2012.

Excellenet business from Amazon’s point of view – and a very significant move away from only promoting other manufacturer’s goods to having their own product to put in front of the buying public. More importantly, whilst not exactly locked in, kindle customers will be heavily motivated to provide Amazon with a level of repeat business that most other vendors can only fantasise about.

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