Can Oprah Save Kindle?
Oprah endorses Kindle. OMG! Stop the presses. OMG! This is huge. OMG!
Once again, Amazon is trying to create buzz around Kindle and show that Kindle can do for books what the iPod did for music.
Yet, what does Oprah’s endorsement say about the success of Kindle? To me it means current marketing efforts have been less than satisfactory. (Hey, I’m trying to be kind.)
It tells me that Amazon couldn’t leverage their massive base of loyal customers. They couldn’t drum up enough demand by marketing it on their home page continuously for six months. Amazon couldn’t do it by using the largest affiliate marketing program on the Internet.
So Amazon, needing a good holiday season for Kindle, resorts to Oprah. For good or for bad, Oprah is perhaps the largest influencer in books, particularly now that J. K. Rowling closed out the Harry Potter series.
Aside from the Oprah stamp of approval, the endorsement came with a $50 off coupon code. What does that tell you about the price point of Kindle? It’s too expensive!
Remember, Amazon hasn’t released any sales numbers for Kindle. One could argue that Kindle isn’t contributing enough to be reported as material. Yet Amazon’s third quarter results do include references to Kindle title breadth (still a puny 185,000) and Kindle title sales as a percentage of total format sales (more than 10%). So is Kindle material or not? Or is it only material when the numbers look good?
If Kindle were selling like hotcakes Amazon would be beating their chest about it, wouldn’t be crawling to Oprah and wouldn’t be providing a $50 coupon code.
The Internati want Kindle to succeed in the worst way, building projections that Amazon finally had to come out and refute as being extremely high. On the flip side, University publishers and the New York Times have both made less than stellar comments and references about volume.
Kindle 2.0 won’t be out until some time in 2009 and there is still no indication that a textbook Kindle is in the works. Again, if Kindle was a clear success, new versions would have been fast tracked. Now Amazon has to deal with Stanza for iPhone and potential for competition from Google.
Can Oprah save Kindle?
