Amazon sells dramatically unspecific number of new low-cost Kindles
The new £109 version of its e-reader has been a hit - but Amazon still isn't specifying how much of a hit in actual numbers (updated)
Amazon has sold out of its new low-priced Kindle - and says that demand has been higher than ever.
According to a press release issued today,
"Amazon.com today announced that more new generation Kindles were ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe following any other Kindle launch, making the new Kindles the fastest-selling ever. In addition, in the four weeks since the introduction of the new Kindle and Kindle 3G, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product, continuing Kindle's over two-year run as the bestselling product across all the products sold on Amazon.com. The new Kindles started shipping to customers today - two days earlier than previously announced."
"Kindle is the best-selling product on Amazon.com for two years running and our new generation Kindles are continuing that momentum," said Steven Kessel, senior vice president, Amazon Kindle. "Readers are excited about all that the new Kindle has to offer - 50% better contrast, 20% faster page turns, 15% lighter, up to one month of battery life - and a new price of only £109."
However, Amazon is not saying, and shows no signs of saying, precisely how many Kindles it has sold, or how many the latest sellout means it has sold. Similarly, when it makes proclamations about the number of ebooks "sold", it's surprisingly reticent about explaining whether those "sales" include free downloads.
Earlier this year it touted the fact that it had sold more ebooks than hardbacks on the US store over three months - but of course we weren't allowed to know how many hardbacks it had sold, nor ebooks, nor whether they were paid-for ones.
However Jeff Bezos did provide one clue:
"Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books."
That means, obviously, there must be at least 500,000 166,000 Kindles out there. Update: The logic for this (revised) reasoning: Larsson is one of the 500,000-ebook sellers. He only wrote three books. The third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, only went on sale via Kindle on 25 May. The first two in the series would have sold many more. So you can get a lower bound for the number if you assume *every* Kindle owner bought *all three* Larsson books. However, the upper bound for the number of Kindles is pretty much unknowable if you don't know what proportion of Kindle owners bought at least one Larsson book.
We really await the news of how many Kindles have been sold. Surely, surely, someone inside Amazon would like to slip us an email...
Meanwhile, the e-reader market is still attracting more entrants full of hope - even though Apple, with its iPad, and Amazon, with the Kindle, look to have it sewn up (though perhaps Sony will surprise us by telling us how many of its e-Readers it has sold; that would help). So say hello to the new - forthcoming - e-reader from a company called MerchSource, which is offering the "Literati" for about $159 via US retail stores from October. We wish it well.
