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: 24

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

Presentation: When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware

Madelyn Olson discusses the evolution of Valkey's data structures, moving away from "textbook" pointer-chasing HashMaps to more cache-aware designs. She explains the implementation of "Swedish" tables to maximize memory density. She shares insights on systems intuition, memory prefetching, and the rigorous testing needed for mission-critical caches.

By Madelyn Olson

Istio Evolves for the AI Era with Multicluster, Ambient Mode, and Inference Capabilities

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced a major evolution of Istio, introducing new capabilities aimed at making service meshes “future-ready” for AI-driven workloads.

By Craig Risi

Article: Bloom Filters: Theory, Engineering Trade‑offs, and Implementation in Go

This article walks you through the Go implementation of Bloom filters to optimize the performance of a recommender. It cover the architectural view, Bloom filter mechanics, Go integration, parameter tuning, and practical lessons learned from making it work under production constraints.

By Gabor Koos

Google Open Sources Experimental Multi-Agent Orchestration Testbed Scion

Designed to manage concurrent agents running in containers across local and remote compute, Scion is an experimental orchestration testbed that enables developers to run groups of specialized agents with isolated identities, credentials, and shared workspaces.

By Sergio De Simone

Anthropic Accidentally Exposes Claude Code Source via npm Source Map File

Anthropic's Claude Code CLI had its full TypeScript source exposed after a source map file was accidentally included in version 2.1.88 of its npm package. The 512,000-line codebase was archived to GitHub within hours. Anthropic called it a packaging error caused by human error. The leak revealed unreleased features, internal model codenames, and multi-agent orchestration architecture.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service