Quote:
Originally Posted by pwjone1
Could be that they did not, or don't trust some of the Sony numbers. Or that they're just talking U.S., or just per year. Hard to know what the right numbers are.
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I guess I should note the sales numbers I've seen, various places, are also somewhat higher. There was a 300k number (Dec 2008) for the Sony Readers, and estimates as high as 1.5M for the Kindle:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-amazon-kindle
but those are cumulative (and somewhat speculative). I would hazard a guess, that whatever the true sales numbers, if Sony is in the process of retooling its publishing format, and willing to leave a gap in its device sales perhaps due to that transition, that it must have been getting pretty soundly thrashed by Amazon, or at least feared that occurring. The Sony move to ePub, while I applaud it, wasn't the move of someone doing really well.
What's interesting to me, also, is the eBook sales, here from the IDPF:
http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm
granted, there's a
long list of
caveats towards the bottom of the page, sounds like the numbers could be quite a bit off, and you do have to consider the source, but given how poorly everything else is selling in the USA (off 30-40-50% frequently), to see something going up this much in so short a period of time, says they're selling a lot of eBook readers, or people with eBook readers are buying a lot more books (or both, at least according to Amazon).