The Kindle 2 ebook reader is the 'most wished for, most gifted and the number one best-selling product across all product categories' according to Amazon USA.
That gives clues as to how many Kindles the internet retailer is actually shipping - a number it has until now guarded extremely closely.
For instance, if Amazon is telling the truth, it must have sold more Kindles last week than copies of its best-selling book, Sarah Palin's Going Rogue autobiography, which, according to Nielsen BookScan, shifted a baffling 469,000 copies in the US.
Amazon is widely considered to have at least a 25 percent market of the US book market - suggesting sales of over 115,000 Kindles a week.
A similar comparison with Susan Boyle's I Dreamed A Dream (700,000+ on its first week debut), considering Amazon's 10 percent share of the CD market, would put Kindle sales at over 70,000 units weekly.
Of course, both these blockbuster titles enjoyed huge pre-orders but even so Amazon may well be on course to sell half a million Kindles in the couple of months before Christmas.
