14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon's world domination plans are going well. Very well, in fact, the company boasts, it has sold a record number of Kindles this month, surprising no one, but the company is still not putting an actual number on sales, surprising no one.
When it comes to digital content, Amazon's strategy is simple and it's working: sell hardware devices at a very low price, bundle or lock them into Amazon outlets and then make up the price through content sales.
It's worked great with ebooks and Amazon is trying to do the same with movies, music, apps and so on, with the Kindle Fire. That seems to be going great as well.
Amazon announced that it's been selling one million Kindles every week for the past month. That's a minimum of four million Kindles, though the number may be closer to five million.
Even more interesting, it's not just the Kindle ebook readers that are selling well. In fact, the number one device, in the US at least, is the Kindle Fire tablet.
It's been selling more than the ebook reader Kindle line for the past 13 weeks, since it's been introduced. And it's been the number one selling product on Amazon.com ever since.
In other places, where the Kindle Fire isn't selling, the regular Kindles hold the title of best selling product, on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.es and Amazon.it.
Amazon regularly issues updates like this, bragging about how many Kindles it's sold but never revealing an actual number. It's come the closest this time, by Amazon's own account, between four million and five million Kindles have been sold.
But that's across all Kindle devices, the Fire, the Touch line, the non-touch, non-keyboard Kindle and the older Kindle 3 with the hardware keyboard.