With forty-plus million iPhones and Touches in the wild, it would seem that Amazon should be worried that their Kindle app for the iPhone would hurt sales of the actual hardware Kindle. Will it?

When the Kindle app for the iPhone appeared some time ago, a lot of people asked themselves (and others) if the app would hurt the sales of the hardware Kindle, and if it would (the consensus was ‘yes’) why on Earth did Amazon release the app? The app was free and the kindle was several hundred dollars. It did not seem like a good tradeoff at the time. The Kindle app is a perfectly valid way to read a book, although it can get a little tiresome after a long period. Still, didn’t it do the same thing as the Kindle, only for free, and wouldn’t that keep people with an iPhone from buying a Kindle?

In truth, there are  a number of reasons that the iPhone will not hurt sales of the Kindle. A number of these are iterated in a column on SeekingAlpha.com, as follows:

Some people who would never have considered a Kindle might buy one because they tried it on the iPhone and liked it.
Sales of the Kindle and e-books don’t seem to have hurt paper book sales.
The more e-readers of any kind, the more e-books Amazon can sell.
There was already competition from other e-book readers, so plenty of options to the Kindle already existed.

When you stop to think about it, there are many more reasons to have the iPhone app than not to have it. Chief among those is that the iPhone (and other cell phones) have screens too small to lend themselves to reading a book. So Amazon can garner e-book sales without losing any real hardware business. Plus, if people like the concept of the e-book, they are likely to look at a larger form factor device such as the Kindle to make the experience even more enjoyable.

But look out when the Apple iTablet hits the streets. That guy is Kindle competition personified and is a true multipurpose computer to boot. The iTablet will be huge competition for the Kindle and of the other e-book readers.

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Entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm under Free Apps, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

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