That’s as close as the Seattle-based e-commerce company has come to revealing its sales numbers–ever.

In the past, it’s spoken in broad strokes, claiming that the device was “the fastest selling ever” or that the “Kindle is far and away our bestselling gift item.”

CEO Jeff Bezos also predicted that sales of electronic books will surpass paperback sales by next summer or fall, and sometime after that they will surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover sales.

Truth be told, that’s likely the more important figure for Amazon, rather than hardware sales. With an app virtually on every portable device, including the iPad and several smartphones, its electronic book distribution reaches way beyond the number of Kindles in the wild.

However, with increasing competition from Apple’s iPad and other devices, like the Barnes & Noble’s Nook, there’s still plenty of competition.

For context, the Kindle team says the number of Kindles sold this holiday season is more than the number sold in all of 2009. The sales figures were first mentioned and reported by Daring Fireball.

In September, Barclays’ Douglas Anmuth guessed that Amazon will sell about five million Kindles this year with the help of the latest redesign and more appealing $139 to $189 price points.

Oh. No. That can’t be it, either: Here’s another Amazon press release, which tallies up Kindle sales without actually telling you how many Kindles Amazon has sold.

As usual, Amazon presents a comparison instead of a count: The company says it has moved more third-gen Kindles, which went on sale in August, than its total of older models for the last three months of 2009. Pause. Does the apples-to-pears nature of this one throw you for a loop? Me too.

And another data point: Amazon is now selling more Kindle titles than hardcover and paperback books. That’s a new wrinkle on an old bragging point: In the past, Amazon said that it had sold more Kindle titles than hardcovers.

Not surprisingly, Amazon doesn’t mention the impact of  the iPad on its e-book sales, but it’s likely substantial, since iPad owners can read Kindle titles on Apple’s tablet.

Want to read about Kindle sales from a source other than Amazon? No problem. Here’s a discussion of J.P. Morgan’s report on the e-book boom, and one from Citi about the impact of the Kindle on Amazon’s P&L; Mark Mahaney thinks the Kindle will account for seven percent of the company’s revenue this year.

New Generation Kindle Device Sales Already Surpass Fourth Quarter 2009 – The Peak Holiday Shopping Season and Busiest Time of Year on Amazon

Amazon.com Customers Now Buying More Bestsellers on Kindle Than Paperbacks and Hardcovers Combined—At a Rate of 2 to 1

SEATTLE—October 25, 2010—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—The new generation Kindle devices are the fastest-selling Kindles of all time and the bestselling products on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.  Today, Amazon.com announced that sales of the new generation Kindle devices since their introduction have already surpassed total Kindle device sales from October through December 2009.

“It’s still October and we’ve already sold more Kindle devices since launch than we did during the entire fourth quarter of last year—astonishing because the fourth quarter is the busiest time of year on Amazon,” said Steve Kessel, Senior Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Readers continue to choose Kindle for its all-new electronic ink screen with 50 percent higher contrast, readability in bright sunlight, long battery life of up to one month, light 8.5 ounce form, flexibility to read their books across all major LCD devices and platforms, and low $139 price.  It’s clear that this is going to be the biggest holiday for Kindle yet—by far.”

In addition, Kindle book unit sales continue to overtake print on Amazon.com, even while print book sales continue to grow.  During the past 30 days, Amazon.com customers purchased more Kindle books than print books—hardcover and paperback combined—for the top 10, 25, 100, and 1,000 bestselling books on Amazon.com.

“For the top 10 bestselling books on Amazon.com, customers are choosing Kindle books over hardcover and paperback books combined at a rate of greater than 2 to 1.  Kindle books are also outselling print books for the top 25, 100, and 1,000 bestsellers—it’s across the board,” said Kessel.  “This is remarkable when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover and paperback books for 15 years, and Kindle books for just 36 months.”

Other recent milestones for Kindle include:

• In the 12 weeks following the introduction of the new generation Kindles, Kindle devices or Kindle-related items such as Kindle books and covers represented 15 of the top 15 bestselling items on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined.

• Amazon sold more than 3 times as many Kindle books in the first nine months of 2010 as in the first nine months of 2009.

• The Association of American Publishers’ latest data reports that e-book sales grew 193 percent between January and August 2010. Kindle book sales growth during the same period exceeded this rate.

The latest to hazard a guess: Barclays’ Douglas Anmuth, who estimates that Amazon (AMZN) will sell about five million Kindles this year. Driving those sales, the device’s latest redesign and its more appealing $139/$189 price point.

“We expect Amazon will sell more than 5 million Kindles this year, going toward 11.5 million in 2012,” Anmuth says. “We believe a bifurcated market has clearly developed between more expensive, multi-function tablets and cheaper, dedicated eReaders. We expect the Kindle to maintain and even grow share of the eReader market, while Amazon’s Apps strategy enables the Kindle store to be the leading eBooks seller across a wide range of devices. We project total Kindle related revenue to reach $1.7 billion this year and grow to $4.3 billion in 2012.”

An interesting bit of crystal ball reading, particularly in light of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s prediction this past summer: “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me.”

That’s author Michael Lewis, talking about the wonders of the Kindle in a 2007 promotional video for Amazon. Alas, what Lewis said then is not true about his new book.

“The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” has earned great reviews and a big PR push in advance of its release this week. But it’s MIA on Amazon’s e-book store (and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store, as well).

I don’t know if publisher W. W. Norton is intentionally holding the book back from digital distribution because it doesn’t want to avoid cutting into hardcover sales. But if it that’s the case, “The Big Short” wouldn’t be the first book to be “windowed.”

That practice is supposed to end with the new “agency” model that Apple (AAPL) and some big publishers are using with the iPad–and that Amazon has reluctantly agreed to. The downside of the new model for consumers is that prices for newly released e-books will be higher than the $9.99 Amazon has been pushing.

Other Lewis titles–from Norton and other publishers–are available for the Kindle. I’ve asked both Amazon (AMZN) and W. W. Norton for comment.

Here’s Lewis in that 2007 video blurb he filmed for Amazon (thanks to Jay Yarow for spotting). And as an aside: Look at how remarkably fugly that first version of the Kindle was! And think about how much more elegant the device became, very quickly. Worth remembering as you start handicapping Amazon’s chances of competing with the iPad–Jeff Bezos and company are certain to keep improving at a fast clip.

The short version: Sargent wants you to know that while he’s going to raise prices on new e-book titles, that doesn’t mean all e-book prices will be going up.

There has been a lot of concern from e-book readers that $9.99 books will no longer be available. Most Macmillan e-books will still be priced below ten dollars. Our e-book sales over the last year clearly indicate that only about a third of our e-book business is in the digital versions of new release hardcovers. Unit sales of older books far exceed our new release hardcover sales, so the $9.99 and lower prices will continue to represent the largest portion of our business.

This will be an interesting data point to remember when prices do bump up this spring, prompted by Apple’s (AAPL) entry into the e-book market via the iPad, and Amazon’s (AMZN) reluctant acceptance of the new scheme.

But ultimately, it’s a red herring. Either you’re sympathetic to publishers’ attempts to protect pricing of their paper-and-ink books or you’re not. If you want a good summary of the debate, check out the comments on Sargent’s post.

• News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch tried to lower expectations that his Fox broadcast network would hire Conan O’Brien.
• Murdoch hinted that his book publishing unit is in line to get a new deal on e-books from Amazon, just as Macmillan has demanded (as will other publishers).

On the second point, here’s my on-the-fly transcription and paraphrasing of Murdoch’s comments about Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and e-book pricing. It’s one of the most candid descriptions you’ll hear from a top executive about Big Media’s reluctance to embrace digital distribution at the expense of its existing system and revenue:

“We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much” because they cost us less to distribute, “but we want some room to maneuver.” The Apple deal…“does allow some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print versions. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again and renegotiate.

UPDATE: Here’s a more complete transcript from Seeking Alpha:

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it. Amazon, sorry Apple in its agreement with us which has not been disclosed in detail does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices.

There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it. It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing.

Again, it’s impossible to stress how scarring the music labels’ experience has been for Big Media. And they’re determined not to repeat the experience. Their takeaway, though, seems to be that they can stave off digital distribution by keeping prices high and inventory relatively scarce. Hard to believe consumers are going to go for that.

Earlier

A first glimpse at News Corp.’s fourth-quarter earnings (which, due to the company’s weird fiscal calendar, is technically the company’s Q2 for 2010): Pretty good. And much better than a year ago (thankfully). After factoring out one-time charges, the company posted earnings of 25 cents on revenue of $8.7 billion.

The Street was looking for earnings of 20 cents on revenue of $8.23 billion, and analysts were also hoping the company would boost its earnings forecast, due in part to a bump from the ginormous success of “Avatar.” No word on guidance in the earnings release, though.

I’ll pick through the release for other worthwhile nuggets for the next few minutes. And then the real show begins at 4:30 Eastern, when the company’s earnings call–easily the most entertaining one in its peer group due to the censor-free presence of CEO Rupert Murdoch–begins. We’ll be looking for commentary on his battle/negotiation with Google (GOOG), upcoming content deals with Apple and the iPad, his thoughts on paid content in general, a dash of political commentary or two, and an update on the turnaround effort at MySpace.

From the release: A pretty nice quarter at most of the conglomerate’s divisions, including the previously battered broadcast TV and newspaper groups. News Corp. says print revenue at The Wall Street Journal was up five percent and ads on the Journal’s digital network were up 17 percent.

MySpace and the company’s other digital properties, shuffled into the “other” category, don’t get much of a mention, but don’t seem to have done much, not surprisingly.

But News Corp does mention that digital media earnings were down $32 million compared with a year ago, “principally due to lower search and advertising revenue.” And the company lost $29 million on “digital media dispositions”–i.e., the fire sale/giveaways of properties like Rotten Tomatoes and Photobucket.

Here’s the breakdown by segment (click table to enlarge):

Liveblog

CFO Dave DeVoe: “Extremely pleased” with the quarter.

Movies: Revenue up due to decent DVD sales (no MGM problem here). Also high costs due to “Avatar,” but big profits from the movie will be coming in during the next couple quarters.

Broadcast TV: Local ads are improving; the telecom, fast food, finance categories are all improving.

Cable: Revenue is up 18 percent. Affiliate revenue is up 21 percent (more money for Fox News subs), and there was a “single-digit” boost in ad dollars.

Newspapers: Journal dollars are up, operating costs down. Ad revenue got better as the quarter progressed.

Books: Revenue up, expenses down.

“Other”/MySpace: Digital media revenue down, but cost-cutting helped trim losses.

News Corp. is boosting its dividend by 25 percent.

Guidance: The company’s operating income growth rate is expected to grow from single digits to the high teens. Better than anticipated: Film group, TV and cable. But revenue goals for digital media, including MySpace, will take longer than anticipated.

Murdoch sings the praises of content. [I will not argue with him, for now]. “Avatar” is awesome, he says, a “harbinger of fundamental change in the industry.” Also really good: “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Fun to hear Rupe say “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

WSJ is the No.1 paper in U.S. in terms of circulation, influence, quality. WSJ.com is a “digital model for newspapers around the world.”

Fox News Channel’s audience is both “loyal and lucrative.” Roger Ailes is doing an “admirable job” [translation: Bite me, Michael Wolff--the author of a recent Murdoch biography].

Last year, Murdoch says, News Corp.’s pay-to-play ideas sounded nutty, but now “the content clan has gathered around our ideas.” Consumers must pay and will pay “to be entertained and informed.” All those awesome new gadgets being made in China and sold at the Consumer Electronics Show need content or they’re worthless. Content, content, content. Get it? Content, content, content.

Murdoch says he’ll be wringing more dollars from cable operators. And “when it comes to online news, we’ll be changing that model too,” adding that News Corp. is in “substantive conversations with device makers on developing subscription models” to deliver content. And don’t forget about 3-D!

Not performing well but “long-term growth drivers”: Sky Italia satellite service. Also Sky Deutschland. And MySpace is “not yet where we want it.” In the last quarter, however, MySpace “started to see signs of traffic stabilization.”

Shout-outs for Chase Carey and other managers (but not by name).

Q&A

Question: How big a deal is retransmission consent in coming years? $40 million a month? $100 million a month?

Chase Carey: No numbers, but it’s going to be a “transforming event.” We have two of top 10 distributors done, more coming. It’s a three- or four-year process to knock these deals out.

Q: Does this fix the broadcast model?

Carey: “Yes, I guess you could say simplistically, it fixes it.”

Q: What’s the timing on an “Avatar” DVD, and what about a sequel? Also, how do TV ads look this year?

Murdoch: For “Avatar,” we think about 60 percent of profits will be in the next six months. Which means the DVD will be coming “as soon as possible,” but the movie will stay in cinemas for a while because we’re doing huge dollars in theaters still. Sequel? “Very early talks about it. Jim has ideas for one. We haven’t come to any agreement with him….Being Jim Cameron, I wouldn’t hold your breath for an early one.” Asked about the economics of a future release (“Will you keep the same revenue split?”), Rupe sort of rumbles and growls and sort of doesn’t have much to say. “Ask anybody; it is very easy to drop a $100 million in a hurry on a film, and we’d like to lay off some of the risk.”

Carey: TV trends for this year are “positive.”

Murdoch: TV stations will be up 18 or 19 percent, but last year was terrible. We’re still down compared with two years ago. Hard to see more than a quarter in advance. In newspapers, it’s hard to see more than a few weeks.

[Missed a question on Sky Italia here.]

Q: What are growth prospects for cable networks? They’ve been driven a lot recently by new subscriber fees. How much longer can you get those boosts?

Murdoch: Overall, “we think we have great potential for growth. Quite a long way to go yet.” Look at how NBCU’s USA is growing.

Carey: In the U.S., we’re moving to “quality over quantity”–we can wring more out of foreign exchange, etc. Fox News is only getting more powerful; it has “great upside.”

Q: Regarding newspapers, what growth came from organic increase versus currency fluctuations?

The majority is from foreign exchange.

Q: Does your guidance assume that the “Avatar” DVD is coming in the next two quarters?

Murdoch: “Yes, but it won’t be 3-D” [which I don't think the analyst was asking about].

Q: Back to retransmission consent: You’ve been getting more and more money from cable guys. Why can’t you get $4 or $5 per subscription for Fox broadcast subs?

Murdoch: “We’re modest people.”

Carey: Hyuk, hyuk. Real answer: It takes time. “We try to approach this constructively. We’ve built businesses with [cable guys], we’ve built valuable cable channels” [translation: patience!]. We want to extract more without killing the cable guys.

Murdoch: That said, we’re asking for the same thing [for broadcast channels] that the cable networks are getting, which “certainly won’t kill the cable companies.”

Q: Please talk about value of film libraries (i.e., MGM). They’re generating big operating profits for cable now. How long will this last?

Murdoch: Regarding the MGM auction, “you can count us out of that one altogether” because others will pay more than we’re willing. And we’re not pursuing the Miramax catalog at all.

Carey: A film library by itself, without new stuff coming through, is a “depreciating asset.”

Q: On guidance: You say the ad market getting better, etc., but it sounds like you’re saying Ebidta growth is slowing.

Murdoch: “We honestly do not have any visibility about the last quarter.”

Q: On books/e-books/Apple, what’s going on with that?

Murdoch: We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much, lower costs to us, but we want some room to maneuver. The Apple deal does allow “some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again.

Press Q&A

Q: What’s up with plans to charge for newspapers on the Web?

Murdoch: “Not ready to announce yet [long pause]. We won’t be ready yet to make an announcement.” A “lot of talks with a lot of people.” There will be more to say within the next two months, Murdoch adds.

Q: Are you still going to fall $100 million short on the Google deal?

Murdoch: Yes. People using social networks don’t use search a great deal. Facebook has seen this, too. It’s “really too early to make confident predictions…but from going down, we’re beginning to go up.”

Q: Can we get some details about Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal?

Nope.

What about Conan O’Brien on late night?

Murdoch: If the programming people can show us we can do it and make a profit on it, we’ll do it in a flash. I’m sure there have been conversations with Conan, but “if you mean real negotiations, no.”

[Missed two questions here.]

Q: Another late-night question: If you do go into negotiations with Conan, how do you placate your affiliates?

Murdoch: It’s a different deal than NBC. They screwed up 10 pm, which reduced the lead-in to local news. Our affiliates run syndicated programming at 11:30, though, so it will take time to adjust there.

Call ended. This one seemed short to me.

More or less redundant disclosure: News Corp. (NWS) owns this Web site.

One of the chief selling points of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle is that once you’ve paid $359 or more for the e-book reader, you can start recouping your investment by buying digital books for much less than it costs to buy their physical counterparts. And the vast majority of Kindle downloads are indeed priced at $9.99 or less (and a third of them are freebies):

Digital books should be higher-margin products than physical ones since the cost to produce and distribute them is so much lower. And they will generate higher margins eventually. But right now, Amazon is subsidizing the cost of those $9.99 books, which means they’re just barely profitable.

Bernstein analysts Claudio Aspesi and Jeffrey Lindsay estimate that Jeff Bezos and company record an operating profit of 61 cents on each $9.99 e-book they sell. But a $24.95 hardcover generates $4.25 in operating profit. That’s a 7 to 1 ratio, and that can’t continue, indefinitely.

The good news: Aspesi and Lindsay argue that Bezos doesn’t have to raise his prices by that much to make his e-books much more profitable. Bumping up best-seller prices from $9.99 to $12.50 would boost his profits from 6 to 20 percent per book, they estimate. The flip side: Costs for the devices themselves will certainly go down.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the device since I bought my first one about 9 months ago. As a frequent traveler and voracious reader, I’ve found the Kindle to be nearly ideal. I never have fewer than a dozen books in its memory, and they’re always things I want to read.

As someone who believes we should often interact with media instead of passively consuming it, however, I don’t think much of the Kindle for any purpose other than reading a narrative. And given what a disaster “digital rights management” (DRM) is becoming for scholarship, culture and ultimately freedom, the device’s restrictions on how I can use what I’ve purchased are deeply troubling.

Still, I’ve been using it with some degree of satisfaction (as have enough other people to have helped boost Amazon’s stock price, so as the holder of several hundred shares I’m slightly better off in that way, too). The second-generation model improved nicely on the first–among other things, fixing some user-interface quirks, letting me charge it via a USB cable, and boosting the battery life.

The books I load onto the device fall generally under the casual entertainment category. I buy a Kindle book the way I buy a movie ticket (or did before going to theaters became such a crappy experience).

These are books, like most movies, that I’ll read or watch once and forget about. A physical book is more like a DVD–something I want to own and enjoy again and again.

So the kinds of books I tend to buy for the Kindle are the sort I’d often pick up at an airport newsstand, namely mysteries, thrillers and semi-trashy novels that I’d sometimes leave in hotels or airplane seat-back pockets once I’d finished them. (I also subscribe to several magazines, and consider it a favor not to see the advertising.)

Once I got accustomed to reading e-books, I started doing something that had been out of character in the analog era: buying new books that, in print, were available in hardcover only. Why? The price, typically $10 (okay, one penny less), was right. In fact, my new-book purchases soared.

But not for long. In recent weeks, Amazon (AMZN) or the publishers (or both) have done their best to deter me from buying the latest releases. Prices have gone up, way up.

Now, I often find books for which I’d have gladly paid $10 listed at $14 or $15. I save these to a list I keep on the Amazon website, called “Too expensive for Kindle,” and periodically check to see if the price has dropped. So far, not yet on any of these.

Hiking prices this way creates a bad deal for the customer. Amazon’s price for a new hardcover is typically just a couple of dollars higher. This means I could buy the hardcover, read it and donate it to my local library, and–after the tax deduction–come out ahead. I’d do even better taking the book to my local used-book store and getting cash.

But I almost never buy new hardcovers of books I don’t expect to reread or use as a reference, because a) I’m kind of cheap; and b) I can stand waiting for the paperback. So if prices stay high, I stay away.

Now, sellers have every right to charge more for popular books, especially when they’re new. This is basic supply and demand. But when the price only makes sense for people who consider the ultra-portability of an e-book paramount, that’s a turnoff for other potential buyers.

As a customer I also understand supply and demand. My demand is extremely elastic, and in this case it’s snapped.

Last week’s introduction of the Kindle DX was framed in many ways by different constituencies, but I was taken aback by the praise heaped on the device by several newspaper people, including the CEO of the New York Times Co. (NYT) (in which I also own a small amount of stock). Newspapers aren’t going to fix their considerable woes with Kindles, and anyone who thinks so lives in a fantasy world.

The DX, with its bigger screen, strikes me as potentially useful in several ways, possibly including the textbook function that Amazon hopes to jumpstart with the help of several universities (including the one that employs me). But if textbook publishers don’t radically cut prices on the outrageously expensive books they sell, they will find themselves creating a strong incentive for precisely what they don’t want: unauthorized copying.

I suspect the DX will prove most useful in more prosaic ways. For example, it could be a nearly ideal container and viewer for technical documentation–thick manuals that need periodic updating, where the cost of printing is prohibitive and the bulk of the books is daunting for the user.

Will all of this be made moot by the widely anticipated Apple (AAPL) “NetPad” or whatever it’s going to be called? I refer to a device that looks like a larger version of the iPod Touch, which would be a wonderful mobile multimedia player, among other likely capabilities.

I doubt it. If you enjoy severe eye strain, reading books on a back-lit, glossy display is just the ticket. The passive displays on Kindles, the Sony (SNE) e-reader and other such devices are much better for this kind of reading.

One size does not fit all in the emerging world of devices. Then again, one carry-on bag doesn’t hold all devices. For now, however, the Kindle has a place in mine.