projecting Kindle to be at 7 Million
"projections" of future numbers are pure bunk. even estimates of the current number are suspect, since amazon resolutely refuses to announce it, but at least we have auxiliary measures that will provide some kind of realistic bounding restraints, one of the most important being e-book _sales_... in this regard, the best observer to pay attention to is david moynihan -- over at blackmask/munsey's -- who has been paying very close attention for years... david was the one who rang the bell when the kindle started moving substantial units. (and pooh-poohed everything else as mere hype and marketing bullcrap.) he has his finger on the pulse; he's the only one i trust. of course, i'm interested in the ipad _regardless_ of the numbers it rings up, because it presents opportunities in a number of new arenas, so i think it will springboard a lot of creativity that the kindle was too crude to free up. current estimates of the kindle weigh in at about 3 million. i don't see them selling more in the next 5 months than they have sold up to this point in time. but i can see them selling a lot of units nonetheless. and i can definitely say that i absolutely love the t.v. commercials they're running. one of 'em has a tune that knocks my socks off every time. i love it. it makes me feel _joy_. i replay it over and over.
in the early innings of ebook reader development.
oh please. we've had worthwhile "e-book readers" for a decade, in the realm of both hardware and software. so these are hardly "early innings". that was long ago. and the development of a mobile computer has been a widespread vision ever since the early days of star trek. yes, things _will_ move a lot faster now, thanks to apple showing the world the direction in which it should move. and we'll be amazed by how far we go in the next 5 years. but let's not pretend we couldn't have taken these steps 5 years earlier, if the hardware businesses didn't have a policy of rolling out innovation as _slowly_ as they can, and soak up as much profit as possible from each step... previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them _correctly_. but if those crude tablets would've cost $500, instead of $1500, people woulda bought 'em, and the world could have started moving forward earlier. but those hardware guys are greedy greedy greedy boys...
I'm wondering why we don't see them more often. . . ?
it's purely a coincidence thing. i noticed i didn't see many iphones until their number got to about 5 million or so. and it was only when it got up to 15 million that i started seeing them on a "regular" basis... but kindles _are_ out there... my girlfriend belongs to a women's philanthropic education organization, and there are three women in her chapter (of 45) who own a kindle. -bowerbird