Cool-er ereader sales pass 7 figures
By Paul Biba
Here is part of an interview with the owner of Cool-er in the Guardian. Great news for all us ebook types:
His start-up company, Interead, developed the coolerbooks.com ebook site. He want to sell the Sony ebook Reader to accompany the downloads but Sony could not guarantee supply, so he created the Cool-er e-reader instead. After a few months in the market, worldwide sales of the Cool-er (which costs £189 in the UK) have surpassed seven figures, he says.
“I came into this market thinking we would be a comfortable number three in the US, and a comfortable number two in the UK,” Jones says. “Now I’m pretty confident we’ll be number two in America by this time next year in terms of sales, and number one in the UK.”
September 10th, 2009 at 9:39 am
This has been discussed at Mobileread. There was general disbelief that Cool-er could have sold 1,000,000 UNITS. It seems much more likely that they meant that they have sold over £1,000,000 in value of Cool-er readers.
It would still be interesting to get clarification on this from Interead.
September 10th, 2009 at 9:57 am
50,000 units in acfew months isn’t bad.
Especially for a product like the cool-er; there must *really* be a big market for readers out there.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for them hitting even third in any market, though…
The big boys are coming.
September 10th, 2009 at 11:15 am
I get 5000, not 50000.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
well you get ~5K at £1m and ~50K at £9.9m (still seven figures)
September 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am
I would take with a grain of salt any number coming from Cool-er, seeing how they shamelessly inflated the number of ebooks available on their site when the reader launched.
They are also claiming to be the “largest ebookstore in the world”.
September 11th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Nothing wrong with ambition, is there?
Of course, it would help if the product got slightly better reviews…
The real problem is that day when (even) 50,000 units per quarter is no longer brag-worthy is quickly coming.
With 100 ebook hardware vendors coming to market each trying to get 5% market share just by licensing Adobe mobile DE the casualties are quickly going to start piling up.
There’s a price war coming by late 2010, folks…