by Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg, Inventor of eBooks Why the Big Flap About the Kindle eBook Reader? It hasn't sold enough to pass 1/3 of one percent, even if you only consider the United States population. I keep reading things about how popular the Kindle is, without much in the way of real numbers to support it. This is much the work of Jeff Bezos PR team spending a million dollars in the hopes of foolling the public to the point where they believe the Kindle is "in," while the FACT is that Amazon has not even sold one million, and is unwilling to even SAY how many they have sold-- following Sony's lead in refusing to give hard facts. The truth is that even counting Amazon AND Sony it was hard to decide if they had sold a million together, at the beginning of 2009, just because of muddy numbers. Oh, yes, we get various prophets, profits, and pundits saying various numbers, but nothing as hard evidence. When Amazon has paid taxes on the sale of a million of the Kindles, THAT will be hard evidence. Defining Our Terms Meanwhile, I hear the word "popular" used more all the time, pretty much as if the media, and my friends, all have read the same public relations blurb and are nice enough to recite it as if Big Brother said to. However, when it comes down to hard numbers, not even, literally, the most paid off pundits will pretend that the Kindles, counting all three models, have sold just one million units, between them all. Not one million. On a United States scale a million is less then just a third of one percent, still zero percent in integers. On a worldwide scale a million doesn't register at all compared to the 1.3 Billion computers, and 4.5 Billion active cellphones were U.N. estimated for this year. The world and U.S. population clocks right now say: 6.778 billion and 306 million Meaning that about 2/3 of all the world has cellphones in active accounts at this very moment. ~66.39% Obviously this is higher in the more developed places. Cellphones are more than popular. . .more ubiquitous. iPods are popular. . .but only ~10 million per year. The iPhone App Store had 60 million downloads a month, right from the first month last year, bringing in lots of cash and new iPhone purchases, as well. What wouldn't Amazon do to hand out 60 million eBooks, in the first month of opening a new eBookstore??? The iPhone App Store brought in a million dollars in a single opening month. . . . iPhone sales were 3.8 million first quarter of 2009. Right in the jaws of the recession. Apple also sold 11 million iPods in the first quarter. Since iPhones and iPods with screens work with eBooks, I say it is far more worthwhile to be addressing those kinds of platforms than Kindle, which supposedly isn't going to need much addressing at all, if it can really handle plain text and .pdfs as well as they say. As for the entire DRM and other proprietary issues the various conversations have brought up, I keep quiet on those issues pretty much, feeling Darwinian pressures, such as they are, will do their thing on that front as well as on the dedicated hardware front, as it did for the Wang word processors, typewriters, and the like. This is the way the world evolves, conservative is not good for evolution. . . . mh