Amazon continues its tradition of avoiding hard sales numbers for their Kindle line of eReaders and tablets but the company is reporting a strong holiday season. In addition to that obvious piece of news, Amazon is also offering up some bits of information that reveal just how good the holiday was for them.
Amazon is reporting that the Kindle line of products sold about 1 million units a week for the entire month of December. That means 4 million Kindles made their way into people's hands over the course of one month, which is insane. The number one product on Amazon during the holiday season was the Kindle Fire with the Kindle Touch and fourth generation Kindle finding themselves in the second and third spots respectively.
The Kindle wasn't just popular in the U.S. The line of devices was also the best selling during the holiday on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es, and Amazon.it. Amazon also stated that the Kindle Fire has been the best selling, most gifted, and most wished for product on the site every week since its debut 13 weeks ago.
Kindles weren't the only things seeing great sales numbers. E-book publishers also had an incredibly strong holiday season with Christmas day being the best single day for e-book sales. When compared to last year, the gifting of e-books was up 175 percent.
Amazon also talked up Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), their self publishing program. It turns out that the number one and number four best selling e-books in 2011 were both self published using the KDP program.
Amazon.com founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos said,
"We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle. And in a huge milestone for independent publishing, we'd also like to congratulate Darcie Chan, the author of 'The Mill River Recluse,' and Chris Culver, the author of 'The Abbey,' for writing two of the best-selling Kindle books of the year."
It's not clear if the Kindle sales Amazon is reporting include units sold by retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, who all carry the full line of Kindle devices. It would be really interesting to see how the actual sales numbers break out between the three Kindle products. I keep hoping Amazon will be more forthcoming with exact sales numbers in the future but it seems they really don't have to be. The bottom line is that Kindles are selling like hotcakes and Amazon is thrilled.
Did you get a Kindle for Christmas? If so, which one did you get?
