Amazon declares 2011 “best holiday ever” for Kindle

By Geoff Duncan December 29, 2011

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Online retailing juggernaut Amazon.com has declared 2011 the “best holiday ever” for its Kindle line of ereaders, with the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, and plain-jane Kindle occupying the first, second, and third places on Amazon’s best-seller charts during the holiday season. Amazon also says the Kindle Fire was the leading seller on its mobile Web site, as well as the most-gifted and most asked-for product Amazon offered. Although Amazon still won’t reveal how many Kindle units it actually sells, it says it moved more than one million Kindles a week throughout December.

“We are grateful to our customers worldwide for making this the best holiday ever for Kindle,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, in a statement. “And in a huge milestone for independent publishing, we’d also like to congratulate Darcie Chan, the author of The Mill River Recluse, and Chris Culver, the author of The Abbey, for writing two of the best-selling Kindle books of the year.”

Chan and Culver’s books were published independently in 2011 using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program—they represented the first the fourth best-selling Kindle books released in 2011.

Amazon’s Kindle line were also the top-selling products for Amazon in Germany, the UK, France, and Italy during the holiday season, and the company claims the gifting of Kindle books was up 175 percent between Black Friday and Christmas Day this year, compared to 2010.

Amazon’s Kindle business wasn’t the only success Amazon had over the holidays: Amazon also notes that the number of third-party sellers who had more than $5,000 in sales via Amazon was 44 percent higher this holiday season than in 2010. Overall, Amazon says third-party businesses sold “hundred of millions of units with billions of dollars” during 2011. And enough people ordered copies of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs to create a stack taller than Mount Everest.

And, as always, Amazon offered some amusing holiday delivery stories: the last Local Express Delivery order the company fulfilled for Christmas this year was for a Sony Rechargeable Battery Pack in Seattle: it was ordered at 2:35 PM on December 24th, and delivered at 6:15 PM that evening.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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