Ten years ago, paper books got some stiff competition: the first Amazon Kindle was released.
Sunday, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos honored the 10-year anniversary on his personal Instagram page with a photo look-back at some of the older versions.
“Ten years ago today, we launched the first-ever Kindle. Happy 10th birthday @AmazonKindle and thank you to all the Kindle readers and authors!” Bezos wrote.
(Click through his post, embedded below, to see additional images of old and new Kindles.)
In the first photo, on the left is the original Kindle, and on the right is the Kindle Oasis, the most recent Kindle released on Oct. 11, 2017 which retails for $249.99. The Kindle Paperwhite, the current best-selling version of the e-reader, is on sale for $89.99, but typically retails for $119.99 on Amazon.
As with virtually all technology, current prices are a whole lot cheaper than when the first much clunkier version came out a decade ago. The first Amazon Kindle retailed for $400, according to a 2007 Cnet review.
The anniversary shout out (which Bezos cross-posted on his personal Twitter account) elicited some very nostalgic memories of the early devices and enthusiasm for the simple usefulness of the device.
“I remember the first time I was reading on my Kindle in a restaurant, the manager came up to me and said, ‘What is that thing?’ When I showed him what it was and what it could do (seriously, a built-in dictionary), he went back to his office to buy one. 🙂 Congrats!”
“I still have my original Kindle displayed on my bookshelf. I carry my Kindle Oasis everywhere and love it as much as I did my first 10 years ago.”
“8 yrs ago I was treated for leukemia in France and in protective isolation for months. No paperbooks allowed but after discussion they approved a Kindle (my doctors had never seen one, had to be new and desinfected). Wouldn’t have survived without one.
So thank you and congrats!”
In the decade since it has launched, Amazon has sold “tens of millions” of Kindles, according to an email from an Amazon representative to CNBC Make It.
Apple competitor to the Kindle, the iPad, launched in January, 2010. The iPad, which has more uses than the Kindle, launched at $499. In July, August and September of 2017 alone, Apple sold 10.3 million iPads, according to the company’s most recent quarterly financial documents.
Though Amazon is today in the third spot behind both Apple and Samsung for total number of tablets sold, according to the most recent annual data compiled by market research firm TrendForce and published in February, Amazon has been showing strong growth in the tablet sector. “Amazon posted a phenomenal 99.4 percent annual growth in its tablet shipments for 2016,” TrendForce says in its written statement.
See also:
How Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went from the son of a teen mom to the world’s richest person
What young Jeff Bezos wanted to be when he grew up—it had nothing to do with e-commerce
Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook.
Source: Tech CNBC
For its 10th anniversary, Jeff Bezos posted 'before' and 'after' photos of Kindle on Instagram