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“Amazon”: Kindle Isn’t That Big A Hit; College Edition In The Works

Posted by Internet Guru
August 24, 2008

Amazon still won’t tell anyone how many Kindles it’s sold, or how many it thinks it will sell. But it’s distancing itself from blockbuster numbers thrown out by TechCrunch and Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, according to a new report.

McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Beuneman spent time with Amazon (AMZN) managment this week and sent out a note Friday. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer summarizes:

Amazon officials gave McAdams Wright Ragen analysts the impression that high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable.

Amazon managers “told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates ‘did not run them by company,’” Bueneman wrote.

Obviously

there’s more than one way to interpret that: The big numbers (TechCrunch says 240,000 sold to date, Mahaney thinks 378,000 by the end of this year) could be in the ball park, but Amazon wants to keep expectations low; or they could wildly off-base. Or somewhere in between. We doubt Amazon execs said anything more specific than that, for fear of running afoul of disclosure rules, but we’ll see if we can get more clarity from Bueneman and company.

One tibit Bueneman could confirm: Amazon is planning on new versions of the Kindle, and wil be specifically marketing the reader to college students, according to the PI’s summation of the report. There are a bunch of hurdles to getting it right — the reader would have to be designed to accomodate students’ needs, and publishers would have to be willing to change their pricing structure — but if Amazon can pull it off, the Kindle on campus is a no-brainer.

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