Amazon touts new Kindle sales record, but gives no numbers

Amazon.com is trumpeting the sales success of its Kindle electronic reader, without actually giving any data to back it up. The e-commerce giant put out a release today calling November "the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday," and it repeated the mantra that Kindle is "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon."

Clearly, Amazon is seeking to promote Kindle this holiday season and capitalize on the supply problems that have bedeviled its leading e-reader competitors, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's new Daily Edition. But given Amazon's penchant for secrecy on Kindle sales numbers, you'll have to take Amazon's crowing with a big grain of salt.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, at a company shareholder meeting earlier this year, suggested that Amazon may never share Kindle sales, so we may be in for more data-free pronouncements. The information vacuum has left various analysts to come up with their own calculations for Amazon's e-reader revenue (Citigroup's Mark Mahaney estimates sales of 1.5 million Kindles this year).

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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