Kindle sales appear likely to get a significant boost on Friday, with talk-show megastar Oprah Winfrey apparently about to endorse Amazon’s digital book reader.
Amazon is featuring a trailer of her Friday show on its site with Oprah talking about her new “favourite gadget” which is “life changing for me”. From a side-on view, the product she is talking about looks very like a Kindle.
In an email to subscribers, Amazon says its founder Jeff Bezos will be appearing on Oprah to talk to her about her new favourite gadget.
Talking to analysts on Amazon’s third-quarter conference call on Wednesday, he denied that digital books were having a cannibalistic effect on regular book sales:
“So far what we have seen with the Kindle book units is that they are additive to physical book units. So when somebody buys a Kindle and the period after, they buy 1.6 times as many Kindle books as they bought physical books prior to buying a Kindle, and they continue to buy the same number of physical books. So that’s what we have seen so far and it’s obviously a very positive outcome. We hope that continues.”
Mr Bezos said he did expect digital books to force down prices of physical ones in the long term but Amazon would hope to sell more units.
A new version of Kindle would not appear until next year at the earliest, the call was told, but manufacturing capacity had been ramped up for the existing one and Kindles were in stock and available for immediate shipment.
That’s good news for the retailer given the sell-out results of Ms Winfrey’s usual endorsements.
