Amazon has mentioned before that it's sold a lot of ebooks and Kindles, but the company has remained fairly guarded when it comes to actual numbers. Unfortunately, that's not changing, but it has released some comparative data on how its digital books are doing.
According to the press release, the latest Kindles are the best selling products on both Amazon's UK and US sites. Furthermore, sales in the 12 weeks since the release of the third-generation devices in August have already surpassed total Kindle sales for the fourth quarter of 2009. Considering that this included the busy holiday shopping season, it looks like Amazon can expect to have a very happy Christmas this year.
More impressively, though, e-books for the Kindle are outselling physical books - paperback and hardback combined - from Amazon.com across the entirety of the top 1,000 bestsellers. In fact, for the top ten, digital downloads are outselling their print equivalents at a rate of 'greater than two-to-one'. All of this is despite the fact that print sales are actually increasing - making the ratios all the more impressive.
It's a shame that, in typical Amazon style, there are no actual numbers to back up these announcements. However, since Amazon is a fairly large retailer, we feel it's safe to assume that the sales figures are all quite impressive.
