*Amazon* is promoting the heck out of its Kindle digital reader on its front page and across the e-commerce site but won’t be shipping any until well into Q109. The current wait time: 11-13 weeks. Dan Frommer confirmed with the company that it has sold out of the devices. There’s also this note on the site: “Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is sold out. Please ORDER KINDLE NOW to reserve your place in line. We prioritize orders on a first come, first served basis. This item will arrive after December 24.” Dan’s take: anyone placing an order now will be getting Kindle 2.0, the updated reader the company said was possible “sometime next year at the earliest.” Or Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) could be having the same supply problems it ran into early on.
One possibility: Oprah’s recent endorsement and the accompanying $50 discount offer sold off existing supplies faster than Amazon had forecast. Analysts were predicting a big holiday season for Kindle this year; it may be that Christmas came early this year and that Amazon met those sale predictions but simply won’t be able to go much further. Another: the lure of Kindle 2.0 will keep sales revved up and a failure to deliver that version will result in a slew of cancellations.
Kindle library: Meanwhile, the only gauge of Kindle’s growth usually offered by Amazon — the size of its library — has topped 190,000, more than double the 90,000 at launch last November. When I interviewed Amazon chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos in May, the number of titles stood at 125,000. (Rafat and I each use Kindles so tend to notice the library expansion — and limits.)
Photo Credit: dailylifeofmojo
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/11\/26\/419-havent-ordered-your-holiday-kindle-yet-never-mind\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_a56c1352ec309c5a8e7a95d793c978c4","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}