Amazon rumored to sell 8M Kindles in 2010

By comparison, Apple is predicted to sell 12M iPads this year

Amazon is rumored to be on track to sell eight million Kindles in 2010, Bloomberg reported late Tuesday.  The information comes from two unnamed sources with knowledge of the super-secret sales figures. 

Previously, analysts predicted that Amazon would sell five million Kindles in 2010, and Goldman Sachs Inc. predicted that the company would sell between four million and five million Kindles this year.  By comparison, Amazon sold 2.4 million Kindles in 2009, one of the sources told Bloomberg.

Amazon is well-known for being highly protective of its Kindle sales figures, but that doesn’t stop the company from frequently reporting record high sales.  In October, Amazon reported that the new generation Kindle, released last summer, has sold more units in the 12 weeks ending in late October than previous generations of the Kindle sold in the fourth quarter of 2009—which is the traditionally the quarter that sees the highest sales figures. 

That announcement was followed up with another in mid-December, claiming that more Kindles have been sold in the last 73 days than all of 2009.  That announcement came around the time that Amazon’s arch-nemesis, Barnes & Noble, announced the debut of its new color Nook e-reader. 

While Barnes & Noble does not disclose Nook sales figures either, Forrester Research estimates that the company will have sold two million Nooks by the end of 2010 (it also estimated that Amazon would sell six million Kindles by the end of the year).  The latest Nook iteration features a full-color touchscreen and Web browsing capabilities, which could give it a leg-up in the e-reader’s competition with the iPad, which has e-reader capabilities.

While Amazon is rumored to sell eight million Kindles this year, analysts have predicted that Apple will sell 12 million iPads, based on previous sales figures.  Debuted in April, the iPad sold one million units in one month, which represented half the time it took the company to sell one million iPhones.  The company sold three million units in 80 days, and went on to sell another 4.2 million iPads between June and September.  In an October conference call, Steve Jobs announced that the company had sold more iPads than Macs for the quarter.  Apple sold a record 3.47 million Macs in the third quarter, which means that to date, the company has sold more than 10 million iPads in 2010. 

Many have questioned how well the Kindle will fare as iPad sales continue to climb.  Recent surveys have shown that more iPad users report being very satisfied with their product than Kindle users.