Less than a year after announcing its Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon says the model is sold out in the United States, and has claimed 22% of all tablet sales.
The news comes shortly before the expected announcement of the Kindle Fire 2 on Sept. 6.
Amazon is also touting that all of the top-selling products in its store since the launch of the Kindle Fire have been digital.
But Amazon has a way of making statements that scratch its back without an excess of facts or context.
It doesn’t define what “best-selling product” means. For instance, has Amazon sold more Kindle Fires than other top-selling items, like the immensely popular book “Shades of Gray”?
And what exactly does 22% of the U.S. tablet market mean? When did it reach that mark?
We have asked Amazon, and will update the story if and when it responds.
One of the company’s claims is easy to understand: The Kindle ecosystem is Amazon’s best-performing product vertical. Amazon is built on content, starting as a bookseller in the late 1990s before committing itself to a digital-content strategy in the mid-2000s and doubling down on that focus by adding movies, TV and music and the Kindle Fire within the last several years.
Earlier this week, Amazon announced that Kindle-exclusive book titles have been downloaded over 100 million times. Amazon also released the Amazon Appstore to foreign markets in Western Europe such as the United Kingdom, Germancy, France, Italy and Spain.
With the Kindle Fire sold out here, it is likely that Amazon will make a concerted effort to increase its presence in foreign markets as well.
