Kindle Is Amazon’s No. 1 Seller This Holiday Season
The Kindle Wi-Fi and 3G e-readers were Amazon’s best-selling products this holiday season, and the third-generation Kindle also became the No. 1-selling product ever for the company, passing the final Harry Potter book, it said Monday. Apple’s 8-GB IPod Touch was also cited by Amazon as one of its best-selling CE products, in units, for the Nov. 14-Dec. 19 holiday season.
Amazon didn’t specify how overall holiday sales compared to last holiday season. Most publicly-traded retailers typically don’t provide holiday sales specifics until January at the earliest. Amazon said only that on the holiday season’s peak day, Nov. 29, customers ordered more than 13.7 million items globally, across all product categories, which it said was “a record-breaking 158 items per second.” That was up from more than 9.5 million items ordered on last holiday season’s peak day, or 110 items per second. On the peak day this year, it said, Amazon’s global fulfillment network shipped more than 9 million units across all product categories. Amazon shipped products to 178 countries this holiday season, it said.
Amazon is “seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet,” said CEO Jeff Bezos. Customers reported using their LCD tablets for games, movies and online browsing, but were using Kindles for reading, he said. Those consumers indicated that they preferred Kindles for reading over tablets because they weighed less, eliminated “battery anxiety with its month-long battery life,” and featured the advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display that he said “reduces eye-strain, doesn’t interfere with sleep patterns at bedtime, and works outside in direct sunlight.” More consumers turned on new Kindles for the first time, downloaded more Kindle Buy Once, Read Everywhere applications, and bought more Kindle e-books on Christmas Day than on any other day ever, Amazon said.
The best-selling Kindle e-books for Amazon this holiday season were John Grisham’s The Confession: A Novel, George Bush’s Decision Points, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Amazon said. But it said Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the most purchased and most gifted Kindle book on Christmas Day. Of Amazon’s top 500 most popular Kindle e-books, Rachel Russell’s Dork Diaries “saw the greatest gain in popularity” that day, it said.
The best-selling videogame products for the e-tailer this holiday season were all software: Activision’s multi-platform Call of Duty: Black Ops, Ubisoft’s Wii game Just Dance 2 and Nintendo’s Wii title Donkey Kong Country Returns, Amazon also said. The top movies were Inception, The Blind Side, and Toy Story 3, while the best-selling MP3 album downloads were Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the Amazon exclusive The 99 Most Essential Christmas Masterpieces by various artists, and Kid Rock’s Born Free, Amazon said. The top wireless products for it were all Android smartphones: Samsung’s Captivate, HTC’s Droid Incredible and Motorola’s Droid X.
The biggest mobile shopping day of the week for iPad, iPhone and Android users this holiday season was Sunday, but Amazon said the biggest mobile shopping day for BlackBerry users was Friday.