Kindle ereader sales triple following Amazon price cut

Online retail giant Amazon.com said unit sales of its Kindle ereader have tripled in the month since the company slashed the price of the device from $259 to $189. Amazon notes that Kindle unit sales grew each month in the second quarter, increasing on both a month-over-month and year-over-year basis--the device is now the site's number one bestselling item for two years running.

Kindle book sales are also on the upswing--for every 100 hardcover titles sold by Amazon over the past three months, it moved 143 premium Kindle ebooks. In all, Amazon sold three times the number of Kindle titles in the first half of 2010 than in the first six months of 2009. Among 1.14 million ebooks sold by novelist James Patterson, about 868,000 are Kindle volumes--four other authors (Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer and Nora Roberts) have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle titles.

In all, Amazon's U.S. Kindle Store now boasts more than 630,000 books, including 106 of 110 current New York Times bestsellers. Over 510,000 of these books are priced at $9.99 or less, including 75 New York Times bestsellers. Kindle also boasts access to over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books.

For more on Amazon's Kindle sales:
- read this release

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