Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Amazon Stops Selling the Kindle Fire (For a Week)

Via a press release, Amazon announced that its Kindle Fire is “sold out.” And, sure enough, if you head to the shopping giant’s site, you can no longer place a direct order for the media tablet.

Good thing Jeff Bezos and company have an event scheduled for next week, where they’ll be introducing at least one successor to the Fire.

Amazon says the original Fire has “captured 22 percent of tablet sales in the U.S.,” but doesn’t cite the data source for that one. Wonder what Apple and Google have to say about that.

For giggles, here’s the complete text:

Kindle Fire—The #1 Best-selling Product on Amazon Since Launch—Now Sold Out

In just 9 months, Kindle Fire captures 22% of U.S. tablet sales

10 of the top 10 best-selling items on Amazon since Kindle Fire launched are Kindle devices and content

SEATTLE—August 30, 2012—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Less than one year ago, Amazon introduced Kindle Fire —combining 15 years of innovation into a single, fully-integrated, end-to-end service for customers. Kindle Fire quickly became the most successful product launch in the history of Amazon.com, earning over 10,000 5-star customer reviews, and is the #1 best-selling product across the millions of items available on Amazon since its introduction 48 weeks ago. Today, Amazon announced that Kindle Fire is sold out, and that in just nine months, Kindle Fire has captured 22% of tablet sales in the U.S.

“We’re grateful to the millions of customers who have made Kindle Fire the most successful product launch in the history of Amazon,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “This has been a big year for digital products on Amazon—all of the top 10 sellers on Amazon.com since Kindle Fire launched just less than a year ago are digital products. Kindle Fire is sold out, but we have an exciting roadmap ahead—we will continue to offer our customers the best hardware, the best prices, the best customer service, the best cross-platform interoperability, and the best content ecosystem.”

Kindle Fire offers customers a vast selection of digital content—over 22 million movies, TV shows, apps, games, books, magazines and more—in one seamless, end-to-end experience, making it easy for customers to browse, discover and purchase. Since Kindle Fire launched last September, all of the top 10 products on Amazon—across all products—are digital products.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik