Tim Bueneman, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Amazon sees a major opportunity for the Kindle with college students. He also told the paper that Amazon is planning several new versions of the device.

"There are already several new, improved versions of the Kindle in the works," Bueneman wrote the paper in an e-mail. "We guess the new version will have improved interface operating controls. This has been an issue with some buyers."

Sales Not Game-Changing

While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, some analysts have put sales as high as 380,000. Those numbers are probably off the mark. Amazon managers told the analysts "that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by the company,'" Bueneman wrote.

Of course, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' hopes for the Kindle go well beyond that mark. In launching the product last year, Bezos predicted it would do no less than "change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish."

Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr -- and presumably Bezos -- has predicted the Kindle will be a $1 billion business. One year out, the Kindle has a long way to go in that regard, said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, in an e-mail.

Kindle Writ Large

"The Kindle is by far the best implementation of a complete digital book ecosystem on the market today, thanks to its over-the-air instant delivery of books," Bajarin said. "However, we are at the dawn of the digital-book era and, while Jeff Bezos has reasons to be happy with its current sales volumes, it does not pose a serious threat to traditional books as we know them today and will not do so for some time."

While Kindle clearly has its fans among "certain book aficionados and early adopters, and appears to get high marks from users who have purchased it," focusing on the education market makes the most sense, Bajarin said.

The rumors are that there will be two new models of the device, one an iteration of the current Kindle and the other with an entirely new form factor. The CrunchGear blog reported the second model will be as big as a letter-size piece of paper, which would make it more appropriate for textbooks. (continued...)

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