[新鮮書市]:Kindle讓亞馬遜獲利豐厚

如果你可以生產出一種商品並將它銷售給很多的人，那麼無疑你會盈利豐厚；但如果你製造的商品只能賣給一
部分人，而你也從中獲利了，那就說明你找對了自己的目標消費羣體。雖然Apple公司首席執政官Steven P. Jobs
從未看好過Amazon的Kindle產品，但其卻無法否認Kindle給亞馬遜帶來的厚重的利潤。

The Kindle Lets Amazon Make a Lot From the Few

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Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg ’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos at the Kindle DX event Wednesday.

If you can make something and sell it to the masses（大衆）, that can be a great business. But sometimes selling something to a much smaller group can also be quite lucrative（獲利豐厚）, if you pick the right product for the right customers.

Compare, for a moment, the difference between the Apple iPod (or iPhone) and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

Look at this rather astounding（令人難以置信的） statistic from Amazon’s news conference on Wednesday introducing a larger Kindle: On , 35 percent of sales of books that have a Kindle edition are sold in that format（35%的圖書有支持Kindle的版本出售）. That’s up, by the way, from 13 percent in February, according to a slide put up by ’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos.

Think of what that means. Amazon has tens of millions of customers. It sold 500,000 Kindles last year, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup estimates. So even if it has twice that many in distribution, that is a lot of e-book buying by a small number of people.

The Kindle must have an enormous penetration of what is a very distinctive, and for Amazon, quite lucrative, segment: very heavy buyers of books.

When Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, was asked about the Kindle in January 2008, he dismissed it as having a narrow market:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

That may well be true, but it doesn’t take into account that a large percentage of the books are bought by a small number of readers. We hear a lot about the long tail（長尾理論） — how most items in a product catalog have a small volume of sales（產品中的大部分商品只能賣出一小部分）. But the same curve can be applied to customers of most businesses. The “head” — a relatively small number of people — represent a disproportionately large share of profits.

Amazon already served many of those people with its mail-order store（郵購商店）, and it built a product that a large number of them have adopted. Most of the rest of its customers — the long tail who read a book every now and then — shrug and ask why they need another gadget when they already have a phone and computer.

By contrast, mass adoption was critical for the iPod, which earns money for Apple mainly through hardware sales. Apple has said it runs the iTunes store at only a small profit. And most people get most of their music from CDs, file sharing or other sources that don’t bring dollars to Apple.

The Kindle is about selling books. There is very little book piracy at the moment, and Amazon no doubt sells the vast majority of the books read on the Kindle. Why wouldn’t it? Its wireless store is amazingly convenient, and its prices can’t be beat: $10 or less for a best seller.

On a conference call with investors in January, Mr. Bezos even said that the Kindle hadn’t cannibalized the company’s paper book business（並沒有搶走公司的紙質書生意）:

We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy.

There are now reports that Apple is developing a tablet computer that would essentially be a large iPhone. Among many other functions, this could be used as an electronic book reader. (Apple, of course, has a long history of entering markets that Mr. Jobs once ridiculed, like, for example, cellphones.)

But this would no doubt be a mass-market product with many uses and a very different proposition than the Kindle. It would be interesting to see how the market reacts to a color（彩色）, back-lit（背光）, touch-screen （觸摸屏）device with much shorter battery life than the black-and-white Kindle.

In some ways such a device may undercut （以低於競爭者的價格出售）the new markets Amazon is staking out for the new Kindle DX: students and news fans, both of whom may value color and speed more than book readers. Moreover, a Web-oriented interface would offer, at least for now, free content from newspapers and magazines.

But Amazon has already hedged its bets here. It has a Kindle application for the iPhone that most likely will also run on the new Apple device, potentially competing with an Apple e-book store.

That would be a battle between two of the most successful and focused companies anywhere. But even if Apple’s (still-hypothetical) tablet outsold （超過）the Kindle DX 10 to 1, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon was able to sell a lot of e-books to its cadre of heavy readers.

Keke View：Try to find yourself in his books！