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Source Claims 240K Kindles Sold
Naturalist writes "Exact data on (the Linux-powered) Kindle sales figures have been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about it, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Now TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M." We've been following the Kindle since its launch nine months ago.
for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M. What in the world is this saying? Lets take a figure lower than the midpoint and call the hardware sales $90 million (although one should be able to get it closer than within ten million dollars if you have the real number sold, since Amazon sells direct and the price is well known). That would only leave about $10 million or so for media sales. Are we really saying that people who shell out all of this money for the DRM encumbered Kindles are not spending more than about 12 percent of that price for stuff to read on it? Seems like a very expensive toy to buy if you're not going to actually use it, yet that's what the numbers here seem to be claiming.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Bzzzt. For anyone who has worked in banking in the US, M means thousand, and MM means million. It bugs me to this day when people write 240M when they mean 240 million.
M is also used in the advertising industry for thousands. For example, the cost of an ad buy can be given in thousands of impressions, known as CCM (cost per thousand).