Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas


Wired: "Happy Christmas. I got a coffee pot. You? If you got a book, it’s likely that it wasn’t made of paper. The succinct title of this Amazon press release tells the whole story: “On Christmas Day, for the First Time Ever, Customers Purchased More Kindle Books Than Physical Books.”

According to the release, “Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history.” Amazon still refuses to break out actual Kindle sales figures, but the following snippet shows you just how good a holiday season Amazon had: “On Amazon’s peak day, December 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide.” That’s a number that would bring most servers to their knees, let alone physical delivery fulfillment systems."


Interesting? It's interesting to me, too. Why? Well...it's all about software. Stay tuned...

Views: 23

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Java News Roundup: GlassFish, TornadoVM, Spring Shell, WildFly, Hibernate, Kotlin

This week's Java roundup for December 15th, 2025, features news highlighting: the fifteenth milestone release of GlassFish 8.0; the first release candidate of Spring Shell 4.0; point releases of TornadoVM, Hibernate Reactive, Hibernate Search and Kotlin; the first beta release of WildFly 39; and maintenance releases of Micronaut Helidon and Vert.x.

By Michael Redlich

IBM Research Introduces CUGA, an Open-Source Configurable Agent Framework on Hugging Face

IBM Research has released CUGA (Configurable Generalist Agent) on Hugging Face Spaces, making its enterprise-oriented agent framework easier to evaluate with open models and real workflows. The move positions CUGA as a practical alternative to brittle, tightly coupled agent frameworks that often struggle with tool misuse, long-horizon reasoning, and recovery from failure.

By Robert Krzaczyński

AWS Launches ECS Express Mode to Simplify Containerised Application Deployment

AWS has released Amazon ECS Express Mode, bringing a simplified process to deploying containerised web applications and APIs. Express Mode lets users deploy production-ready services in one shot, bypassing the usual detail required around ancillary requirements such as IAM roles, load-balancers and scaling.

By Matt Saunders

QConAI NY 2025 - Designing AI Platforms for Reliability: Tools for Certainty, Agents for Discovery

Aaron Erickson at QCon AI NYC 2025 emphasized treating agentic AI as an engineering challenge, focusing on reliability through the blend of probabilistic and deterministic systems. He argued for clear operational structures to minimize risks and optimize performance, highlighting the importance of specialized agents and deterministic paths to enhance accuracy and control in AI workflows.

By Andrew Hoblitzell

Google Metrax Brings Predefined Model Evaluation Metrics to JAX

Recently open-sourced by Google, Metrax is a JAX library providing standardized, performant metrics implementations for classification, regression, NLP, vision, and audio models.

By Sergio De Simone

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service