Looks Like a Million to Me
How I Realized that Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader Were Exceeding Sales Estimates
When the Kindle first launched there was plenty of predictions about how it and its predecessor the Sony Reader would sell. Over time the chatter died down, halted partly by the Kindle going out of stock. At the end of April, the chatter returned and hit full volume after last week’s Book Expo America in Los Angeles. The catalyst was Jeff Bezos’s speech, which let out some tantalizing, yet cryptic, information on e-book sales volume at the Kindle store. The chatter, as reported in the New York Times, has publishers and others speculating that Amazon has sold somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 Kindles. I think all the speculations are completely wrong. By my calculations, combined sales of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader will be 1,000,000 units in 2008.




