Doug, that article was written in 2008 and is stating one analyst's estimates of how many Kindle units he thinks Amazon will sell. If Amazon had done $1Billion in Kindle sales, they would have announced it.

Apple sold over 22 million iPods just this past quarter.

Mass-market sales for a book reader will be achieved when a significant proportion of book sales are digital. Right now it's a rather piddly number. I've seen figures ranging from 16M for one month to 35M for a quarter (2009 numbers). Physical book sales are many billions per year. It's amazing how difficult it is to find concrete numbers though.

Amazon may end up selling more books because of the iPad in the end. They currently have world-wide licensing in place and an app already for sale.

The value proposition for a device dedicated to reading books isn't there at this moment in time. And that was what my mass-market comment was aimed at. When you couple the price of the device with the price of content, the right numbers just haven't yet been reached to pull the elasticity to that mass-effect level.

I don't know too many heavy book readers, but I know a few. They're not currently interested in an ereader. The low-cost ones are really garbage and the half-decent ones are still too pricy. When these things hit the right price point I think we'll start to really see the balance tip in favor of digital delivery.

I don't think the iPad is going to be the device to do this either - thought I'd get this out there to make sure no one jumps on me for that. It could be the Kindle, but not the Kindle 2 at $250+