Kindle Sales Explode During the Holidays… E-book Sales Too!
Amazon proudly announced they sold over 4 million Kindle devices during the Holiday shopping season (late November through December). Over a million Kindles a week were purchased while e-book sales jumped 175% over last year.
More interesting information comes out of these figures. It’s not just about Amazon success. In fact, Amazon is suspected to have been losing money on every Kindle Fire sale (that can be read more than one way), but the huge increase in e-book purchases may have made up for that.
Kindle Sales Figures
The big news, from Amazon’s perspective, was in Kindle device sales. All three Kindle family products (Fire, Touch, and standard Kindle) held the top 3 spots on Amazon’s bestsellers list for the entire month of holiday shopping. The Fire was the most wished for and gifted product on the site this season as well.
Overseas, it was the top selling product in the UK, France, Spain and Italy.
Further, Amazon was prepared and had no back order issues this year and actually outpaced Apple’s iPad in sales as well.
E-Book Winners and Losers
With e-book sales up over 175% from last year, many authors and publishers made out very well this season. Interestingly, the number one and number four best selling electronic books this year were both self-published by the author independent of publishers via Kindle Direct Publishing. That’s an amazing statistic and shows something important: the old paradigm of publishing houses is falling.
E-books as gifts followed the sales trends, with year-on-year numbers matching sales growth. Christmas Day was the largest day ever for Kindle book downloads, which makes obvious sense.
The losers? Big publishing houses. Most of them count on hard-copy book sales during the holiday season and their sales figures this year were not so good. They remained relatively constant with little growth. Amazon reported that more e-books than hardcover books were sold during December and self-reported numbers from publishing houses seem to corroborate this with last year seeing more e-books sold than hard copies, as of February 2011.
Third-party Amazon.com Sales
Third-party sellers, now a big part of Amazon.com, also made out well this year. Third-party sellers experienced record holiday growth with 44% more $5,000+ sellers on Amazon than the year before. This makes sense, given the new, expanded, and easier-to-use seller platform Amazon rolled out and has been advertising heavily.
Bestseller Of All?
The best seller of all, according to Amazon numbers, was Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. By a landslide. It was the most-browsed, most bought, and most gifted thing on Amazon ever.
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