Amazon Sold a Million Kindles a Day Through Holidays
Amazon.com reported Thursday that its Kindle Fire tablet was the most purchased item on its website during the holiday season. Of course, Amazon doesn't disclose actual sales figures on its Kindle devices, and hasn't since launching the line in 2007, but the company made it clear in a statement on holiday sales issued Thursday. Amazon also reiterated its previous statement that it had sold more than a million kindles a week since the season began on Thanksgiving Day. The company's second and third-biggest sellers were also Kindle devices.
As Amazon's e-readers were flying off of virtual shelves, so were the digital books that are read on them. Amazon said sales of e-books were up 175 percent compared to 2010's holiday season, and Christmas Day ended up breaking a record for e-book downloads from Amazon in a single day. Books were also a hot seller in physical form, led by Walter Isaacson's biography of Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs. In fact, the world's largest online retailer said that if all the Steve Jobs books sold on the site during the holiday season were stacked, that stack would be higher than Mt. Everest.
Though Amazon did not issue actual sales figures, it described its holiday sales as successful, adding that third-party sellers on its site experienced record holiday growth. The company said that the number of third-party sellers moving more than $5,000 in merchandise on the site increased 44 percent over a year ago. Amazon's characterization of the holiday period as consistent with the sales enjoyed by the industry as a whole. Online data tracking firm comScore said on Thursday that the e-commerce sector enjoyed a 15 percent increase in sales over the holidays, when compared with the same period a year ago, as US online retail sales surpassed $35 billion over the last 56 days.
|
