I can't find any figures on how many units of the Amazon Kindle have been sold to date. You'll recall that's the handheld e-book reader Amazon have been selling since late last year. It has a screen that lets you read in daylight. And it will download new books over the ether while you're out and about. All we know are these two things. 1) This is Amazon. They put a lot of effort into this so they must have been expecting significant demand. 2) They massively under-estimated demand and sold out after 5.5 hours. They have not been able to get back in stock since. Ever unit that comes in goes on clearing their order backlog.

So however many units have been sold, it's a lot more than Amazon were expecting. And if you look at the magnitude of the launch, they clearly expected to sell a lot. I'm just saying, is all.