Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times.
The article doesn’t hide the fact that Amazon has the vast majority of marketshare, with Barnes & Noble saying it has 27 percent of the market, compared to Amazon’s share of “at least 60 percent.” At the same time, the article writes that “to the delight of publishers” (who see Amazon as a competitor), Barnes & Noble has “grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon.” In response, Amazon told The Times that Kindle sales (a number that includes both the Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle e-readers) grew 177 percent during the nine-week holiday period, compared to the same period in 2010.
How does that stack up against the Nook? The article doesn’t say, but earlier this month, Barnes & Noble actually reported its own holiday growth numbers. During the same period of time, the company’s device sales grew 70 percent — not bad, perhaps, but a sign that Amazon still has greater momentum.
The Times also reports that Barnes & Noble engineers are “putting the finishing touches” on the next version of the company’s e-reader, due for release sometime in the spring.