Ridiculously popular, Really?  What is your bar for ridiculously popular?

Do you have any idea how many Kindles have been sold?

Do you have any idea if it is even the best selling eBook reader?

Please explain.

Believe me, I'm as shocked as you are that the Kindle is popular, but it's been consistently sold out at Amazon.

I don't have exact, current figures, but as of August 1st of last year, they had sold 240,000, and estimates put it on pace to become a billion dollar business (including books and programs sold) by the end of this year.

The closest rival is Sony's E-Reader (which I've used, and is great)... The estimate for Sony is 300,000 in late December, though presumably, given the pace of sales, Kindle most likely had between 400,000 and 500,000 by that.

Seriously kind of shocking, right?

Being a nerd, I much prefer the idea of an OLPC in tablet mode: radar.oreilly.com/.../olpc-and-the-ki.html

Being out of stock isn't the same as being popular, let alone ridiculously popular.

By all accounts Amazon has sold far below a million kindles - I am not sure how this equals ridiculously popular.  I am starting to believe that bloggers talking about the Kindle is ridiculously popular but I am not so sure about the actual product itself.  

As for Analyst projections - meh!  Wild ass guesses don't seem to be a good predictor for success.  The analyst who predicted the Kindle will be a billion dollar business in a few years (not this year) put sales on an iPod like growth curve.  Do we really believe that the E-Book reader can match the MP3 market?  I sure don't.

i just got one, and i think it's a very compelling product. It took me a year to warm up to the idea, but every person i know who has the first generation version loves it, and the second generation is (a) a heck of a lot more attractive (looks and feels like an apple product, down the packaging), adn (b) has a number of cool new features. The best feature and the deal sealer, for me, is the "text to speach" function, which basically reads the book to you if you click a button. Though it is a robotic voice, the algorithms behind it clearly read the grammar of sentences and adjust the cadence and tone appropriately. why does this matter? i can read a book at home, listen to it as i go to work, listen again as i am cooking in the evening, and read before bed (not like this is likely to happen on a typical day, but you get the idea). And all this for one purchase price about 40% - 50% off list prices. The other killer function is the ability to download the first chapter of any book any time for free ... the first chapter is often all you need for a nonfiction book anyway.

It seems pretty clear based on reviews elsewhere that the kindle is the best product, run by the dominant player ... smells a lot like the early ipod (and no i don't own stock or have an affiliation with the company, but yes i have a gadget obsession problem). Most digitally inclined serious readers will buy future generations of this product in the next decade or two ... the question is really just when. And there is benefit to making the leap sooner given that books are 40% less and you can hold 1,500 books on a single kindle.

p.s. i agree with commenters who say it will take much longer for e-books to match the mp3 market ... we will need flexible color screened e-books that you can drop in the tub. It won't take 5-10 years like the i-pod -- probably more like 15 - 30 years. One major obstacle is the affection that we all have for books, which exceeds the affection people had for CDs for tapes or records by a large margin.

Thanks for the round-up, rufybaby, and some very good thoughts there.