A report released today by research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics, showed that 26.8 million tablets were sold globally in the fourth quarter of 2011. That represents an increase of 150 percent over the 10.7 million tablets that were sold in the fourth quarter of the previous year. The report does not include sales of dedicated ereaders like the Kindle in its sales numbers.
The report said that Android tablet sales jumped to 10.5 million units up from 3.1 million units. Most of that jump was due to the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. Stifel Nicolas analyst Jordan Rohan came out and upped his estimate of Kindle Fire sales to 6 million units during Q4 2011. We’ll hopefully find out the actual Kindle Fire sales tomorrow after Amazon releases its earnings report.
The Kindle Fire and Nook are the only real two Android tablets out there. Everything else has sold less than a million units. This is significant as both are from book-oriented retailers.
The research report also found that there were a total of 66.9 million tablets sold in all of 2011. That was up 260 percent from the 18.6 million sold in all of 2010.
So tablet sales are absolutely skyrocketing. The holiday quarter accounted for almost half (40 percent) of all the tablet sales in the entire year.
The massive increase in tablet ownership will definitely cause a huge boost in ebook sales and demand for ebooks at libraries.