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Given Barnes and Noble reports gross sales for its digital division business separately from the stores, and that its online sales includes everything (such as paperback books) as well as Nook hardware, it's possible to come up with realistic sales ranges for the Nook through end of April (they last reported Feb 1 to Apr 30 quarter).
If they sold about an equal number of Nook B&W and Nook Color, it is really hard to imagine they sold more than 1.5 million units combined. That's a very healthy number but hard to see how that surpassed Amazon.
From the Q4 Analyst call Jun 21: "the overall NOOK revenue, physical and electronic, was $250 million across dotcom and the stores for the quarter". If that was all Nook Color, that's 1 million units; if it's a mix of models, something more than that. They also stated that over a million new Nook accounts were opened during the quarter.
(Kobo, btw, also reported more than 1 million new Kobo accounts in the same period.)
The chief takeaway, however, is that the dedicated e-reader business, despite ongoing consolidation as weaker players fall out of the market (or fail to launch), is growing significantly.
Amazon estimated the US market at around 30 million people -- those who read (buy?) more than 2 books a month. That leaves a pretty healthy number of folks yet to embrace ereaders and, as we know, there appears to be a market for more than one per household ... and even more than one person in active reading households.
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