[Charbax]

But they aren't saying how many. That is kind of funny of Amazon to make a press release saying the Kindle was sold out in 5 hours and then not saying how many units that amounts to.

I don't think it was many thousands of units, probably max a few tens of thousands of units I would guess.

And yeah, it's probably hard for PVI in Taiwan to keep up with the E-Ink screen production no matter how much money Amazon is paying them upfront. The factories making those E-Ink screens probably simply aren't big enough to produce E-Ink screens in quantities of millions, probably that current factories have a capacity limit of some hundred thousands a year. But also probably that in preparation for the release of the Kindle, that in Taiwan, PVI has invested whatever hundreds of millions required to ramp up the production, probably all paid for in advance by Amazon, Philips, Sony and some others..

I'm just guessing here, but I think in terms of risk taking and physical capacity to mass produce, the Kindle production has to be gradually ramped up. A bit like the OLPC XO computer also. For that computer for example, first weeks mass production capacity is only something like 40 thousand units per month, then it can gradually jump to 400 thousand units per month. Simply something to do with even the largest screen factories in the world, cannot just jump start mass production of new technologies from day one. Cause a full capacity specialized factory to produce those new kinds of screens such as the XO screen and E-Ink screens costs billions to make. So unless Amazon believed so much in the Kindle months in advance to pay in advance the construction of those specialized factories to have a full production capacity in time for Christmas, then the only thing to work would be gradual ramp up of production adjusted after the initial market demand, and it probably has to take at the minimum a few weeks for a new production cycle to result in new batches of shipped products.

I'm totally guessing here, but possibly Amazon is not going to satisfy all the demand for Christmas (it will be sold out), but are counting on large demand up till Christmas to make them confident about ramping up production to maximum capacity to be delivered after Christmas.