Amazon Likely To Break 8 Million Kindle Units Sold This Year

And that's a LOT. Not really the most a pad-type piece of tech has sold, compared to Apple's 4.5 million iPads sold PER QUARTER this year (according to Tech CNN), but heck! It's up there! And it's over 60 percent more than analysts projected on Bloomberg. Business Week's spoken with two sources "aware of the company's sales projections" who say that compared to last year's 2.4 million Kindles, their figures for this year are monstrous. Bloomberg estimated, on average, that Amazon would sell 5 million Kindles in 2010.

Quite a varied group of analysts are still suggesting that Amazon will sell a number closer to 5 million Kindles this year: Citigroup, Barclays Capital, BGC Partners LP and ThinkEquity LLC. Close to these are Caris & Co. predicting 4.8 million, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are deciding to be that one guy on The Price is Right calling it somewhere between 4 and 5 million.

The only mathematical figure released by Amazon itself has been a report back in October (2010) which said that the new lighter, faster Kindles released in July had surpassed their total sales in the fourth quarter of 2009, the busiest time of the year for sales. It may be important to note that Barnes & Noble and Sony don't release numbers for their e-reader sales either. I think they're all just shy.

[Via BusinessWeek]