Direct from the Kindle King's mouth: there'll be no public Kindle sales data to chew on, and a color Kindle is years away.
That's the word from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who, although reportedly bullish on the Kindle at Amazon's annual shareholder meeting Thursday, told investors at a question-and-answer session that Amazon will keep Kindle sales figures close to the vest and that a color version of the Kindle e-reader is still definitely in the development phase.
The Kindle 2, the updated version of Amazon's original Kindle, launched in February, and it's since sparked huge excitement in the technology sector for e-books and e-reading. The next question on the lips of many analysts is, well, how's it doing? In numbers, Jeff, is what's meant by "how it's doing."
"I'm not sure we will ever reveal all the numbers," Bezos said at the meeting, according to The Wall Street Journal and numerous other reports. "Our point of view is that there is a competitive advantage to keeping the numbers close."
Bezos reportedly said he looks at Kindle sales data every morning, but that other prying eyes would have to remain curious as to what he sees on those data sheets.
Amazon's Kindle has taken the e-reading world by storm, and Amazon hasn't wasted any time shoring up its advantages in the burgeoning market. It's already released another Kindle, the large-screen Kindle DX for magazines, newspapers and textbooks, snapped up ostensible competitors like Lexcycle, which makes the popular iPhone e-reading application Stanza, and even made available an ever-improving Kindle application for iPhone, tacitly acknowledging that the Kindle's shelf life as a dedicated e-reading device is probably limited.
For now, however, Amazon's Kindle is king of the e-reading mountain, and would-be competitors are coming from all sides. The most well-known, Sony's eReader, has a new marketing campaign and an agreement with Google for Google's broad library of public domain digital titles. Among other device makers is Interead.com, a U.K.-based startup, which next week will trot out its Cool-ER reader, another e-reader. And let's not forget Plastic Logic, which this week is demonstrating its e-book reader, a flashy new model that has Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities in addition to the usual slate of e-reading bells and whistles.
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