Amazon Sells Over 1 Million Kindles Per Week as Kindle Fire Demand Soars
Amazon is usually very secretive about the sales figures of the Kindle family. However, when it comes to the market-changing Kindle Fire tablet, analysts aren’t shy about sharing their predictions, giving us at least some benchmark for how many Kindle tablets are being sold. Most analyses suggest around 5 million devices were sold just this holiday season.
However, Amazon is now breaking the silence and for the first time is releasing somewhat concrete sales figures—and they are impressive. For the past 3 weeks, Amazon has been selling more than 1 million Kindles per week! If pre-orders are factored in and this trend continues, the actual sales numbers could easily surpass the forecast of 5-6 million Kindle Fires.
“The Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched—it has been the best-selling product on Amazon for 11 weeks straight, we have already sold millions of units and are producing millions more to meet the high demand. In fact, demand is increasing—Kindle Fire sales have risen week by week for the past 3 weeks. Customers buy Kindle Fire because it’s easy to use, and it has fully integrated services that make it easy to enjoy what they love—watching movies, reading books and magazines, listening to music, downloading apps, playing games, and surfing the web,” commented Dave Limp, VP of Amazon Kindle, on the development.
“Our Kindle eInk eBook readers are right behind the Kindle Fire on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Customers report preferring the Kindle eBook readers for longer reading sessions, and some even buy two devices this holiday season—a Kindle Fire and a Kindle 4 or Kindle Touch.”
Apple really needs to watch out. As we reported earlier, many customers are choosing the Kindle Fire over an iPad, which could significantly impact Apple’s sales statistics given the mentioned sales volume. But it’s not just Apple that needs to worry about the new competition; Google should also be concerned. The Kindle Fire uses Android as its operating system but doesn’t rely on any Google services; instead, it is fully integrated into Amazon’s service offerings. Particularly, the Amazon Appstore could attract many developers amid continued strong demand for the Kindle Fire—and this could eventually lead to interest from other tablet manufacturers. You’ll find more on this topic in another article.
Given this demand, it’s not surprising that Amazon has decided to launch the Kindle Fire exclusively in the US for now. Tablet demand in foreign markets is generally much lower, so by launching only in the US, they can more easily ensure continuous availability. For comparison: Amazon has sold more Kindle Fires in the last 2 weeks than all the tablets sold in Germany during the entire year of 2011.
The second comment from the Kindle Vice President aligns with another article we published today, in which we discussed the future of eBook readers and noted that tablets and eBook readers will coexist. The current purchasing habits of Amazon’s US customers confirm this once again.
