The Oct 20, 2006 ePage Insights newsletter from Nick Hampshire is reporting some early figures for the number of Sony Readers that have made it to market. Here are some interesting tidbits to whet your appetite, which are directly quoted because of the sensitivity to specific wording:
* An initial batch of 10,000 units of the new reader was delivered to Sony US in September
* ...these went on sale in around 750 shops across the US as well as via online outlets such as Amazon and of course Sony’s own online sales operation.
* One of the main high street outlets were 300 Borders shops, these typically sold out of the dozen units they had received within the first two days.
* ...with the first batch likely to be sold out before the end of October we can be confident that first month e-book sales will have topped $M 0.5.
For more information, you can subscribe to his newsletter at
Digital Publishing News. There is also an RSS feed there, but I couldn't get it to work. There may be some sort of sign up process required.
At any rate, this is the first realistic stab at sales figures that I've heard so far. It's not clear how accurate these numbers are, nor what his sources are, but if they are accurate, this is a very encouraging beginning for the Sony Reader.
Note: From some great observations in the thread discussion, it seems that the intent of the original article may have been to say that e-book sales (not Reader hardware sales) will have topped $500,000. But the information is sketchy and we obviously don't have the details sorted out... yet. I have adjusted the thread title, and will try to contact Nick (the oritinal article's author) for clairification.