Incremental Blogger

The speculation is over. Oprah’s website makes it official. Her favorite gadget is the Kindle.

“This summer, Oprah received a gift that she says changed her life. “I’m telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world,” Oprah says on her blog.

Did everyone get a Kindle in the audience? I don’t know, but all Oprah viewers are getting $50 off:

“As a special offer for Oprah viewers, Amazon.com is giving $50 off the price of Kindle. Enter the promotional code OPRAHWINFREY during the checkout process at Amazon.com to receive the discount. This offer is valid through November 1, 2008.”

I wonder if this will bump Kindle says–especially in economic times like now. After all the Kindle isn’t exactly inexpensive. Despite this, I think we’ll see a boost in Kindle sales. This is a good sign for widespread adoption of small devices like this. Good to see.

With Amazon’s announcement that it intends to acquire spoken-word content provider, Audible, it looks like not only with the Kindle book reader get a boost, but online content in general will too.

Acquisitions such as this will breath life not only into Audible–by giving them a larger platform–but also will give a nudge to the online book market in general. My guess is potential competitors won’t see this as an end of an era, but rather as a continual evolution and growth of the online marketplace–a marketplace with lots more growing room.

If Audible had been left to languish, people would have seen it as a deadend concept. With a big backer like Amazon, people will be thinking not in terms of a sales ceiling, but rather potential growth. My guess is that this will inspire the competitive spirits of the competition.

It’ll also mean that our Kindle (actually Layne has it now) will have some great audible content today and tomorrow. Good move.

In an interview with John Markoff and David Pogue, Steve Jobs explains why he doesn’t think Kindle will do well:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

I don’t know the numbers, but I’m guessing that Steve Jobs is suggesting that 60% of American adults haven’t picked up a book at all in the last year. Could be, but then what’s he really saying here? That Amazon can’t make a business of selling books because too few people read them?

Hmmm.

This is their market after all. My guess is that of Amazon’s customers a large portion read and buy books. So what’s going on here with Kindle is that Amazon is selling a premium product to its customers. Seems as a reasonable upstream approach for them.

Time for some numbers. There are 300+ million people in the US. Of those, I think I’ve read that about 70% are adults. So that’s about 210 million. Now taking Jobs’ 40% number, that gives a market of approximately 80 million adult book readers. From these, let’s say a third are avid enough readers that they’d be interested in a Kindle type device. So now we’re down to 24 million or so.  And then let’s figure that 2% of these people each year might actually purchase one–that’s about 500K units a year. At $400 each that’s a couple hundred million a year in revenue. Not bad.

Of course, Amazon can go the other way with this calculation and start with its number of top book purchasers and take a percentage of them to see if it’s a big enough number. To me, I’d take the risk even if it weren’t. But that’s just me.

What I find so fascinating about the discussion around the recently released Amazon Kindle book reader and devices like the iPhone is that people are generally open to the slate form factor….and touch.

This is a trend that I hope Tablet designers are paying attention to. Why? Because for the most part over the last couple years it appears that the Tablet PC designers and marketers have resolved that the slate form factor (for the most part) wasn’t where the majority of the market potential was and “convertibles” were the “right” form factor, I think they got it wrong and these new devices are going to be teaching them a lesson.

Microsoft had it right with its prototype orange Tablet PC and better yet with its Haiku UMPC design. Even NEC’s LitePad was a smart design–among others. Generally, the thinner, the better. The easier to use, the better. I’d also add the cheaper, the better. To me the OEMs and Tablet PC marketing has lead the Tablet PC to a nameless, homogeneous, fairly uninspired collection of notebooks.

I don’t simply want a better 1997 notebook. I want a better device for 2007. I want to be connected. I want to have instant access. I want to be able to share. I want to be able to interact. I want to be learn, express, explore, inspire, be inspired, make money, purchase things, and above all enjoy my life a little bit more, wherever I am.

Maybe I have to wait until 2017. We’ll see. But I’m confident that one day, we’ll look back and realize that this is exactly what technology has given us–or should I say we have given each other.