Amazon, which has so far provided little information on just how well its Kindle devices have sold, issued a press release this week to finally shed a bit of light on this. It reports that it is now selling over a million Kindle devices (Kindle ebook readers and the Kindle Fire tablet) a week. The Kindle Fire in particular has been Amazon’s best selling, most gifted and most wished for products since its introduction.
“Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched – it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand. In fact, demand is accelerating – Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks. People are buying Kindle Fire because it’s a simple, fully-integrated service that makes it easy to do the things they love – watch movies, read books and magazines, listen to music, download apps, play games, and surf the web,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Our family of Kindle e-ink readers are close behind Kindle Fire on the Amazon.com bestseller list. Customers continue to report preferring their Kindle e-reader for long-form reading, and in fact we’ve seen many customers buy two Kindles – both a Kindle Fire and a Kindle or Kindle Touch – this holiday season.”
Amazon is readying a new firmware update for the Kindle Fire to address a number of issues and deliver better performance, touchscreen performance improvements, and improved privacy controls.
The Kindle Fire sells for US$199 and the Kindle ereaders start at US$79.