BENGALURU: The sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers rose 80% to Rs 113.28 crore in the year to March in India, according to documents filed by the USbased online retail giant’s main local unit Amazon Seller Services.
"It’s the features available on the Kindle, in addition to the increasing availability of Indian language titles to Kindle Unlimited that has resulted in an increase in sales," said an executive on the Kindle India team on condition of anonymity. "Users can adjust the font size, add notes and highlight paragraphs (besides) automatic saving of the furthest page read. We will introduce more features in 2017."
Amazon recently launched digital books in five Indian languages — Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati – that can be read on the Kindle and is in the process of adding more. Ebooks have outstripped physical book sales in India on Amazon. "We have seen Kindle users in India download 10 times the number of books, in comparison to ordering physical copies on Amazon," the person said.
Amazon didn’t respond to queries. The company has added hundreds of Indian language titles to Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service that offers access to over one million ebooks. In October, Amazon announced the acquisition of publishing house Westland, the subsidiary of the Tata group’s retail arm Trent for Rs 40 crore.
Its bestselling authors include Amish Tripathi, Rujuta Diwekar and Devdutt Pattanaik among others. According to analysts, the company expects Kindle sales in India to grow at a compound annual growth rate of at least 50% for the huge movement from physical books to ebooks in the Indian market," said Ajay Shah, media and entertainment, transaction advisory services partner at EY.
"There is a chance that Amazon’s Kindle might look at more acquisitions of Indian publishing houses if they get access to exclusive titles. The major competition they would have in this space would be consumption of ebooks on smartphones through publishing startups but Kindle’s features have their own advantage and Amazon can make the kind of investments required to keep growing."
Also, Flipkart exited the ebook sales in 2015. The Indian market is poised for growth at a time when US ebook sales have taken a hit, down 11% to $ 2.8 billion from 2015, according to the Association of American Publishers, even as revenue from the overall book trade — of print, electronic, audiobooks — rose almost 3% to $ 15.8 billion.
Amazon does not disclose specific revenue for the Kindle or other hardware devices such as the voice-controlled personal assistant Echo. Amazon’s Chennai R&D centre is one of the biggest is the Kindle and other devices.
No comments:
Post a Comment