Amazon sells 13.7M items on Cyber Monday

The company announces the third generation Kindle is its highest selling item of all time

A couple of days ago, I wrote about dissolving in tears every Christmas after I see my bank statement.  This year has been no different, except now I have mobile banking on my iPhone so I can burst into tears on the go (this year I only over-drafted my account by two dollars, but one year I swear I got my checking account down to exactly $0.00—I don’t even know how I did that).  But this year, while I was crying over my bank statement, Amazon was rolling in dough.  The company announced Monday morning that on Cyber Monday (November 29), customers ordered 13.7 million items worldwide, across all product categories.

The number breaks down to a record high of 158 items ordered per second.  And what were they buying?  Why, the Kindle, of course!  In addition to its record-breaking numbers on Cyber Monday, Amazon also announced that the third-generation Kindle is now its best-selling item of all time, eclipsing the seventh and last book in the wildly popular Harry Potter series.

Flash back to 2007: Amazon sold 2.5 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”  While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is saying definitively that the third-generation Kindle has sold more than the seventh Harry Potter book, rumors have been circulating that the company is on track to sell eight million Kindles in 2010. 

Bezos also appears eager to quash talk about the iPad cannibalizing the Kindle.  "We're seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet,” said Bezos in a prepared statement. “Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions. They report preferring Kindle for reading because it weighs less, eliminates battery anxiety with its month-long battery life, and has the advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display that reduces eye-strain, doesn't interfere with sleep patterns at bedtime, and works outside in direct sunlight, an important consideration especially for vacation reading.”

Translation: The Kindle is just as cool as the iPad!

The company added that on Christmas day, more people turned on new Kindles for the first time and bought more Kindle e-books than on any other day in history.  The company shipped to 178 countries, the most remote of which was the hamlet of Grise Ford, north of the Arctic Circle in Canada.

In the U.S., “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was both the most purchased and the most gifted Kindle e-book on Christmas Day. 

The company also came through for the procrastinators this year, as well.  The last local express delivery order was placed at 1:41 PM on Christmas Eve and was delivered at 8:04 PM that same evening.  

Image source: amazon.com