It took me a bit longer than usual to come up with the summary but here goes…
Kindle book count increased 41,016 (13.8%) in the month of July with final count being 335,897. Notice odd fluctuations between the 9th and 14th. Perhaps some publisher couldn’t make up their mind… Besides that book growth was linear at about 1,300 books per day.
As for Kindle blogs, there were 445 (7.5%) new blogs in July with final count being 6,364. It looks like bloggers are loosing interest in Amazon Kindle as publishing blog platform. The growth was linear with a rate of 14 new blogs per day. As for BlogKindle.com, it more than doubled its number of Kindle subscribers.
Since there were no major changes in subject disstibution compared to June 2009, I’m going to skip these charts this month.
Here’s a scoop of what happened in July 2009:
- Kindle 2 price drop was probably the most important event in Kindle ecosystem last month. The fact that Amazon now sells eBook reader for under $300 is a big deal for many customers who were sitting on the fence.
- A very close runner up would the the story about Amazon remotely deleting books from customer’s devices due to the fact that it was self-published on Amazon illegally and developements that followed including possible class-action law suit.
- Speaking of law suits… Amazon agreed to replace Kindles damaged by leather covers as a result of law suit. Arizona state university was being sued for intentions to use Kindle in educational process because of accessibility issues.
- An interesting hack was released for Kindle DX that allows direct PDF download to the device.
- There were a lot of news related to Kindle competition. Many players are entering the market including: COOL-ER eReader, weFound, Barnes & Noble along with PlasticLogic, Samsung and Google.
- However Amazon doesn’t sit idly either. Kindle is getting adopted by such companies as MicroStrategy and BlackBoard. Kindle and eReaders in general are being recognized as increasing influence by USA Today and Credit Suisse. There are also plans to expand Amazon Kindle Store to new devices.
- There were also some news about upcoming UK release of Kindle. It will be interesting to see how it will play out. I’m currently in the UK and while I was reading Kindle in public places here not once was I asked about the device contrasting with US where I get asked about what is that device that I use for reading quite often. Perhaps it has something to do with British people not talking to strangers without being properly introduced :)