After Kindle’s success there has been a flood of ebook readers being demoed all around. With the inevitable death of print media, the digital medium has a new home with handheld readers. Amazon is expected to sell close to 400,000 Kindles in 2009, and the Kindle market is expected to hit $1 bln by 2010. Amazon has 150000 titles for the Kindle, and the real revenue from the Kindle is in terms of ebook sales and not just the hardware. Quite similar to how the iTunes and App Store works for Apple. It is being now speculated that Apple would target the ereader market and the upcoming / rumored Apple tablet is being labeled a “Kindle Killer” already.
The latest we heard about this was the estimate that Apple would sell 1.4 million tablets in 2010. While nothing is official about the Apple tablet yet, the entire industry seems to be guessing what would the Apple tablet really be. Rumors have been flowing since years, and we have had numerous predictions and insider claims to what exactly is cooking up. But all this is just confusion with different sources betting on different screen sizes, whereas some smartass analysts claiming both.Steve Jobs one himself dismissed the idea of the eReader being a mainstream device. So is the Kindle / eReader now a big enough market for Apple to make a move? Not really. I would expect the Apple tablet to do a lot more, perhaps a premium netbook? A laptop replacement? Not being sure of what exactly it would be, I am sure that amongst other things it would be a Kindle Killer!