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New Amazon Kindle searches spike to challenge iPad mini
September 02, 2010
September has only just begun and already people are talking about Christmas. Planning committees are being assembled to organise the office Christmas Party, high street retailers are bringing out decorations and online gossip has turned to the hottest gifts for the festive season.
One of the hotly tipped gifts for Christmas 2010 is Amazon’s latest e-reader, better known as the Kindle 3. Traditional “dead tree books” are never going to be eradicated completely, but ebooks are starting to hit the mainstream. In the last year, generic searches for e-readers have doubled, while Kindle-related searches have increased eight fold.
With the smaller, sleeker and cheaper Kindle 3 now available Amazon look set to further capitalise on their position as a market leader in the e-reader market.
As with many gadgets, search behaviour favours branded search terms rather than generic terms. Searches for branded terms search as ‘sony reader’ and ‘amazon kindle’ have always been more popular than ‘ebook’. What’s interesting to note from the above chart is the rise in popularity of Kindle-related search terms against other branded terms. In the last month searches for Kindles have never been higher. Amazon’s product is pulling away from the competition, where previously the volume of searches has been roughly even between Kindles and other e-readers.
While the Amazon Kindle has a competitive edge over other similar products, the real brand war will be fought between Amazon and Apple. The iPad is more than an e-reader but it is also a lot more expensive than the Kindle and its peers. With Amazon’s aggressive pricing strategy the Kindle 3 could provide a challenge to Apple’s successful iPad.
A couple of weeks ago Sky News reported that Apple was planning a new ‘iPad mini’ to be launched in time for Christmas. The ‘iPad mini’ is rumoured to have a seven inch screen, much closer to the new Kindle’s six inch reading screen. Searches for both ‘ipad mini’ and ‘kindle 3’ have spiked since the end of July but the online popular vote seems to be with the Kindle, as in the last week searches spiked for ‘kindle 3’ while there was a direct correlation in a drop in searches for ‘ipad mini’.
Could the new Kindle be the iPad killer? Amazon certainly seem to think so, reporting that the Kindle 3 has been selling faster than any of its previous incarnations, according to Mashable. Apple however, sold its first million iPads in 28 days, less than half the time it took to sell its first million iPhones. It is still worth noting that searches for iPads are 300% higher than searches for Kindles.
Amazon have their work cut out for them if they intend to threaten Apple’s dominance - follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with the latest analysis.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 09:50 AM
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In Categories Apple | Christmas | Gadgets | Shopping and Classifieds
Robin,
Only yesterday I was looking at a new product soon to be launched by Samsung which is going to be a lot cheaper than the iPad. Amazon are really pushing the Kindle but I would really like to see some of the numbers in sales. I reckon they think this will replace books in the next few years but I think that's a completely different debate.
Posted by Ance Treatment | September 8, 2010 12:41 PM