Amazon’s Kindle — despite seeing stagnancy in western markets — is continuing to enjoy the popularity it first witnessed at introduction, here in India. According to latest papers filed by the ecommerce behemoth in the US, Kindle saw a sharp, 80% rise in sales in India, landing in an impressive ₹113.28 crore in Amazon’s revenue basket. The report came in via Economic Times.
The SEC filings by Amazon in the US can be accessed here, the Annual reports and Proxy statements can be accessed here. And considering that the company never discloses product-specific revenues, we’ve reached out for an official comment from Amazon on this report.
Just so you can gauge how impressive Kindle’s sales have been in the subcontinent, eBook sales on Amazon India — a category which current ecommerce market leader Flipkart abandoned in 2015 — have far outstripped the number of physical books being sold on the Amazon’s India platform.
Talking on condition of anonymity, a Kindle executive told ET,
It’s the features available on Kindle, in addition to the increasing availability of Indian language titles to Kindle Unlimited that has resulted in an increase in sales. We have seen Kindle users in India download 10 times the number of books, in comparison to ordering physical copies on Amazon.
Indians love reading. The subcontinental reading population is the largest globally. Team that fact up with the availability of local language titles as eBooks, available for a fraction of a price of a physical one, and you have the winning formula for earning more sales for readers. And Amazon, seems to have extracted the most results out of that. With offerings of over 3 million titles, all available at a paltry ₹150 per month subscription fee, on a cheap yet quality-assured ₹5,999 Kindle, the deal becomes way too lucrative for the price-savvy, tech-savvy, love-for-reading Indian.
And eBook sales aren’t coming down in India, despite of the fact, that the US has seen a 11% decline in the same. According to Nielsen’s The India Book Market Report, book readership in India is poised to explode because of a massive, young and increasingly mobile population.
