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Amazon: we’re pretty sure we’re 70 to 80 percent of the market

David Carnoy over at CNet sat down with Ian Freed.  There’s nothing really new aside from this one question:

CNET: Well, Apple’s saying it’s got 20 percent market share and I’ve heard Barnes & Noble saying it’s got 20 percent as well, so that would leave you guys with…

Freed: Honestly, something doesn’t add up because we’re pretty sure we’re 70 to 80 percent of the market. So, something, somewhere isn’t quite working right. I encourage you to do some more research. Obviously, from the beginning of Amazon we’ve been very metrics-focused and we don’t typically throw out numbers we don’t firmly believe in. Take that 70 to 80 percent number and add up all the others and something somewhere isn’t going to add up.

Footnote: The 20% claimed by Apple was a deliberate obfuscation on the part of Steve Jobs. What they 20% really means is that the 5 big publishers reported that 20% of their income comes from iBooks. Obviously that’s a lot less than 20% of the market.

For sometime now Mike Cane has been saying that Kindle is the de facto industry standard. I have to agree with him. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to look at it.

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Comments


Mike Cane August 3, 2010 um 8:35 am

It grates on me every day that Amazon and Kindle has won. It’s as if they deliberately designed Kindle version 1 to repel me and blind me. Apparently the mass of book readers never gave a damn that the first device was a design horror show. Bah!


Rich Adin August 3, 2010 um 8:36 am

Impossible to declare Amazon anything more than boastful. Until it releases hard data and until "the market" is defined, numbers like 70% are meaningless. Is the market ebooks in the U.S., the U.S. and Canada,, U.S. Canada, and Europe, or something else? Perhaps Amazon is claiming 80% of the ebooks sold in the State of Washington.

Without real data all we have is Amazon’s puffery — nothing more. No analyst has hard numbers and certainly none of us bloggers have any hard numbers from Amazon.

Besides, the race is far from over.


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