Although both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are notoriously tight-lipped about their sales figures, DigiTimes has talked to upstream providers and believes that 53% of e-book readers shipped to US vendors in March were B&N Nooks
Of course, given the indirect nature of the research, it’s a little hard to be very confident in these figures. Still, even if the Nook wasn’t the top-shipping e-book reader in March, it’s definitely showing up as a strong contender.
(Found via Engadget.)
Uh, aside from DigiTimes’ erratic record, there is no there there:
All they said is that more Nooks shipped to *vendors*, not that they were actually sold.
Well, with Nook moving into Best Buy B&M retailing they would perforce have to ship a lot of product just to fill the stockrooms, no? Add in the pipeline backfill to their own stores and you get a lot of product going to vendors that may or not have sold.
Kindle, however, had no retail presence in march and only added a few Target stores in April. And, to top it off, Amazon reportedly cut back Kindle production pre-iPad, expecting a hit in sales which resulted in a shortage for a while when sales didn’t decline.
It’s good to see Nook getting good sales but let’s not get carried away until we see meaningful numbers about units sold to *consumers* from a source a bit more reliable than Digitimes, okay?