iPads and Kindles: It's Not Either/Or, and Millions Will Own Both

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With apologies to Soren Kierkegaard and fanboys everywhere, we do not have have to make an either-or choice between the Kindle and the iPad. It’s not Ford vs. Chevy, Celtics vs. Lakers, or Beatles or Stones.

You can have both, and you can love both.

I have both, and I love both.

The day before the Kindle was launched in November 2007, you could have asked 100 people if they wanted a dedicated ereader and none of them would have said yes. Amazon has now sold about 4 million Kindles, and people are buying Kindle books every day and reading them on Kindles, PCs, Macs, BlackBerrys, and, yes, all the i-devices from Apple.

Before Apple announced the iPad, tablet computers were a total non-starter. Now Apple has announced that it sold 3 million iPads globally in its first 80 days.

Now that Amazon has reduced the price of the Kindle to $189, it is easy to see what the future holds. The Kindle, because of catalog, connectivity, and convenience, is the best dedicated ereader. The iPad is well on the way to being the best device for everything else.

Within the next two years, the installed base of Kindles will be over 10 million. For the iPad, the installed base will surpass 25 million. For the iPhone and the iPod Touch, it will surpass 200 million.

And there will be at least 5 million serious readers who own both an iPad and a Kindle.

And there will be entire landfills devoted to laptops and netbooks.

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.