In a recent press release, Amazon revealed that it’s selling Kindle e-book readers like hotcakes: over a million per week for the past three weeks. The company’s new $200 Kindle Fire tablet, which is part of those figures, is pulling its weight, too: “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,” said Dave Limp, Amazon’s VP in charge of Kindle products.
While Kindle sales may have been bolstered by virtue of the fact that Amazon added several models to the product line this year—the basic Kindle, the Kindle Touch, the Kindle Touch 3G, the Kindle Keyboard, the Kindle Keyboard 3G and the aforementioned Kindle Fire tablet—the “most successful product we’ve ever launched” quip about the Kindle Fire seems pretty impressive, especially given reports about the tablet’s supposed shortcomings.
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Amazon faces stiff competition from Barnes & Noble, which also refreshed its line of Nook e-book readers for the holidays. The bookstore offers the Nook Simple Touch for $99, the Nook Color for $199 and the Nook Tablet for $249. In an apparent effort to place a bit of pressure on the Kindle Fire, the $199 Nook Color just got a software update that added “over 100 feature enhancements, access to top video and music services, popular apps, comics and more,” including Netflix streaming. Several of the features were previously only available on the $249 Nook Tablet, which includes a faster processor, longer battery life, double the RAM and double the storage of the Nook Color.
While Amazon’s typically pretty vague about actual sales figures, the revelation that it’s been selling Kindles at a million-per-week clip recently seems to indicate that the company is happy about how things have been shaping up. And though it hasn’t been revealed in granular detail how well each distinct model of Kindle is selling, Limp says, “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.”