Amazon shifts 500,000 Kindles

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 4 Feb 2009 at 09:48

A Citigroup analyst has claimed that Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008.

Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped on sales of its eBook reader, though chief executive Jeff Bezos claimed recently that "we're particularly grateful for the unusually strong demand for Kindle in the fourth quarter."

However, Citigroup's Mark Mahaney has been rooting through the company's agreement with Sprint, the network which provides Kindle's free downloads service, and emerged with the 500,000 figure.

Past that point things become slightly more speculative. Mahaney claims that by 2010 the Kindle will be worth $1.2 billion to Amazon, a startling figure which he derives by assuming that the rate of adoption will be the same as that of the iPod during its second year of release, and that everybody buys at least one eBook per month.

Mahaney is the analyst who infamously claimed that Kindles "will become the iPod of the book world".

The analyst is also claiming the Kindle 2 will be unveiled next Monday.