Ever since Amazon starting put the estimated “x number bought in past month” metric at the top of most product pages on their website, I find it interesting to use those numbers to see how well Kindles are selling.
Right now it’s not looking good for the Kindle Colorsoft. After it was released it had a 10k+ sold number like the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite, despite all the bad reviews initially about the infamous yellow band of light.
Then the sales numbers started to dip under 10k, but then they put the Kindle Colorsoft on sale a couple of times earlier this year at $50 off and the number went back up to 10k+ briefly.
The last sale ended about a month ago, and since then the Kindle Colorsoft’s sales numbers have plummeted drastically to just 5k+ units sold in the past month.
You might think it’s just a down time of year for buying Kindles, but the sales numbers for the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite haven’t dipped below 10k+. In fact, there are two colors for the base Kindle and each has sold 10k+, so it’s at 20k+ at least.
The 16GB Kindle Paperwhite comes in three colors, and all three of those have sold 10k+ units. The Signature Edition also comes in three colors. Black has sold 10k+, Jade has 7k+ and Pink has 4k+. So between the 6 Paperwhite variants Amazon has sold well over 50k units during the past month, and that’s not including the kids variants or the bundle packages.
Considering the fact Amazon appears to cap Kindle sales numbers at 10k+ (they never go above that), they’re likely selling way more than 50k Paperwhites per month. Plus they’re selling at least 20k basic Kindles per month. And yet the Colorsoft is only selling at a rate of 5k units over the past month?
That’s not good for Amazon’s color Kindle. As bad as that sounds, the sales numbers for the Kindle Scribe are even worse. It’s interesting how the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite appear to sell like hot cakes year round, while Amazon’s newer upgraded models with unique features are far less popular.
The fact that Amazon priced the Kindle Colorsoft so high certainly has something to do with the lower sales volume, but you’d think there would be more interest in Amazon’s first color Kindle so soon after it was released. Apparently most people still prefer black and white E Ink screens for reading—somebody should tell that to Kobo.
I preferred Kindle screens to all others for several generations. Something about them just looked so good to my eyes. But the urine yellow tint of my PW5 has sent me back to my PB HD3. I haven’t tried Colorsoft yet and probably won’t after that experience. I hope they bring back the great looking screens in the next product cycle.
I want to get a Colorsoft, and would already have one, but I absolutely will not until the yellow banding is 100% resolved.
It stands to reason that there’s a bell curve in sales, though. The more expensive Kindles will sell fewer than the more value-priced Paperwhite, whereas the difference in cost between the Basic and Paperwhite is smaller and an easier justification for people to spend a little more to get a much nicer device, whereas color is a harder value prop to sell, and the larger size of the Scribe makes it a niche device.
For example, the Kobo Libra Colo(u)r, which is the closest competitor to the Colorsoft (and even lower-priced) has only sold 1K+ in the past month. Does that make the device a dismal failure? Of course not.