The Kindle wouldn’t have happened without the iPod

But even the 500,000 estimate would mean that the Kindle is outpacing iPod unit sales in the iPod’s second year on the market, when it sold only 378,000 units. That means if you turned back the clock and launched both at the same time, the Kindle would be outselling the iPod by 32 percent.

The problem here is that you can’t compare sales figures.  The Kindle is, in some sense, standing on the shoulders of the iPod.  The iPod changed the way people thought about buying and listening to music.  The Kindle hasn’t even yet earned the “iPod of books” title that was nevertheless bestowed upon it almost immediately.

Yes, Amazon has sold a lot of Kindles.  Yes, they sell them so fast they can’t keep them in stock.  But the Kindle is just a pretty slick new package on essentially the same old business model.  It hasn’t fundamentally changed the market.

If you had released the two at the same time, Kindle sales would have been much lower because people would have had no idea what to do with it.  The iPod paved the way for the very idea of the Kindle.  It gave it a context in people’s minds, something similar that it could be compared to.  It’s impossible to measure what this did for Kindle sales, but it did something, and you can’t ignore that something in making hypothetical projections.

Article: Is The Kindle Outpacing Early iPod Sales? – washingtonpost.com.