Amazon Post Your Kindle Sales Numbers!

Amazon post your Kindle sales numbers! Consumers, analysts, amateurs, and industry followers keep hearing the hype from Amazon about their electronic book reader and here at Fly Flop Fold we see the bad moon arising.

Amazon seems to be taking a page from the Apple, Inc. business cookbook (beginners edition):

1. Create Product
2. Build Hype
3. Sell Product
4. Announce Shortage

But, does Amazon deserve their Apple 101 sticker, or is it all smoke-and-mirrors?

Everyone seems to be getting antsy over Amazon staying mum about the big question of how many Kindles has Amazon sold? At the start of this article there were 277,000 search results on google.com for: how many Kindles have been sold. Upon the conclusion of writing this article, a few days later, there are over 500,000. Search for yourself to see if Pinocchio's nose has grown any larger.

It has been creeping up on Amazon's own Kindle forum in the Discussions section titled "how many Kindles have been sold?"

The thread started by Gretchen Batton:

"Does anyone have the faintest, foggiest notion of approximately how many Kindles have been sold? I'm just curious.....hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands?"

One user responding to a few questions on the topic at once had this to say:

"...all you have to look at is Apple and the iPhone or iPod. The numbers of both of those devices drove Apple stock prices right? And how about Microsoft and Vista and I can keep on going...for me the only reason Amazon wouldn't announce numbers because they were bad or because (like it seems to some of us who've been waiting for one for a while) they just aren't able to ship in any significant numbers at all."

Bizjournals.com says Since Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) hasn't revealed how many Kindle devices have been sold, some media reports have hinted that Amazon may have production problems or may be trying to create the perception of high demand for the units, which sell for $399.

eFluxMedia contributor Ona Zachary article titled "Be Patient if you Want a Kindle" takes a stab with

The company has denied several times to reveal how many Kindle units it has sold until now, and this has raised questions whether Amazon really had manufacturing problems or whether the company only wanted to give the impression of high demand, for advertising purposes.

Kindle Timeline Highlights

11/19/2007 Amazon announced the Kindle.

11/21/2007 The Kindle was released for sale and sold out in five and a half hours. "Amazon [did not disclose] how many Kindles it actually had ready to go."

01/30/2008 Amazon quarterly results conference call. Amazon was questioned TWICE by analysts about how many Kindles were sold through the 2007 holiday quarter. CEO Jeff Bezos danced around the question as if he was a contestant on "Dancing With The Stars" and the judges (analysts) did not like the performance.

- OK. Now take a breath. I'll wait. -

Question: What doesn't make sense about the conference call?
Answer: Amazon loves touting holiday facts and figures gift-wrapped in festive fluff served on press release platters. For example:

1. Amazon.com sold the Wii at approximately 17 per second.
2. Amazon.com sold enough high-def DVD players to cover seven football fields.
3. Amazon.com sold enough Hannah Montana wigs to outfit the entire audience at her December 20th show in Providence, RI.

02/01/2008 Investing and Financial news outfit the Motley Fool contributor Rick Aristotle Munarriz even raised a brow and wrote "However, we don't know many of those Kindles have been sold."

The mystery still remains.

Amazon Kindle: Bad Moon Arising

What is creeping over the horizon for Amazon does not look pretty. Amazon is heading down the path of doom and destruction by likely becoming a victim of it's own hype creation. “Oh what a tangled web we weave...” the saying goes. We can't imagine what spin Amazon PR can put on this disaster. How do you recover from the following scenarios:

1. Amazon continues to hide the numbers and the Amazon Hype Machine becomes discredited and dead in it's infancy.
2. Amazon slowly attempts to take the Kindle out of the spotlight, which will be unsuccessful after coveting the Kindle sales numbers. There are countless ramifications on this move, so it is unlikely.
3. Amazon releases how many Kindles have been sold, under immense pressure, and disappoints Wall Street and causes distrust among customers. Bye-bye stock price.
4. Amazon releases how many Kindles have been sold and trys to down-play the small figure with a variety of spin tactics. Another scenario that will completely discredit their Hype Machine and kill it in it's infancy.
5. Amazon releases how many Kindles have been sold and blows away expectations with iPod-like sales figures – we'll even take numbers from the early days – and this becomes a big AH-HAH gotcha! - NOT!

So what is Amazon actually doing?

Looking through the smoke and dodging the mirrors with special Tai-Chi maneuvers, this is how we see the Amazon Kindle Sales saga unfolding.

• Amazon holds off another quarter on the number of Kindles sold
• Amazon tries to gather as many sales as possible to inflate the number, including those that have not shipped and have just been ordered
• The explanation, or spin, if you will, is going to be that because of these questionable “production” issues and outgrowing manufacturing capacity, there is no fair way to determine what really could have been, if they only knew

Then the lime light will go away and on to their next try, if anyone listens.

So, how do you disrupt the plan? Draw as much painful attention to Amazon's failure at being an Apple product protege, which get Wall Street and their analysts attention back on this, and with enough squeezing and lamps on Amazon, they may just have to crumble under the pressure.

AMAZON: POST YOUR KINDLE SALES NUMBERS!