The FINANCIAL — Amazon announced that its Kindle e-book reader is now the most-gifted item in Amazon's history.
"We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history," said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, according to CNET News. In another milestone for the e-reader, the company noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn't offer specific numbers for either category.
During the holiday season, Amazon shipped to 178 countries, as PC Mag informs. The "last minute" award goes to an Amazon Prime customer in Seattle, who ordered a Kindle at 1:43pm on Christmas Eve and received it at 4:57pm that evening.
According to Amazon, the Kindle’s peak day of performance ahead of Christmas was registered on December 14, at which point customers around the world placed orders for a whopping 9.5 million Kindle units – which equates to around 110 units per second, The Tech Herald reports.
Other notable tech items also selling well through Amazon over the Christmas period include, the 8GB variant of Apple’s non-telephonic iPod Touch, the 4.3-inch Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS system, Casio’s Waveceptor Atomic Dual-Time wristwatch, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007.
In the video game category, top sellers were the Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board; New Super Mario Bros., and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, according to CNET News.
The most popular phones were the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Unlocked Phone, the Plantronics 510 Bluetooth Headset, and BlackBerry Bold 9700 for AT&T, PC Mag reports. Amazon did not provide too many specific details about computer sales except to say that "if all the computers customers purchased this holiday were stacked one on top of the other, they would be more than twice as high as Mt. Everest."
According to the same source, customers also purchased "enough shoot-and-share camcorders to supply 50 years' worth of non-stop YouTube watching" and "so many Blu-ray disc players that if you lined them up side to side, they would stretch for more than 27 miles." Customers weren't just buying consumer electronics. Amazon also said that its customers purchased enough fruit cake to equal the weight of a 1967 Volkswagen Bug and enough gingerbread house kits to reach the top of the Sears Tower if stacked on top of one another.
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