Kindle "sells out in under six hours"

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 09:47

Amazon's $399 Kindle e-book reader sold out in just five and a half hours, according to CEO, Jeff Bezos. It hasn't been revealed how many units the company actually prepared for launch, however.

"In five and a half hours, we were sold out of our initial inventory," Bezos claims. "Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out," reads the Kindle's product page on Amazon.

The Kindle features an EVDO connection to Amazon, so that new e-books can be bought and downloaded wirelessly. The device has enough storage for 200 books, which cost about $10 each to download.

Many of the available books that Amazon is charging for have expired copyrights, meaning that they are free to download elsewhere. The company are also charging 99 cents a month to read otherwise freely accessible blogs from the device.

Customers ordering a Kindle now are being told that they will ship on 3 December, when new shipments of the device arrive.