Amazon expected to sell 8 million Kindles in 2010

The Kindle has been touted as one of the best-selling items across all categories at Amazon.com, but it’s hard to tell just how many units of the popular e-reader have actually shipped out as the company is keeping those figures under wraps. According to a report by Bloomberg, which cites "people who are aware of the company's sales projections," it will blow past analysts’ estimates and break 8 million units sold milestone this year.

Just last week Amazon revealed it managed to move more units in the last 73 days than all of 2009 – and that’s just for the newest Kindle version so the device is definitely picking up some heat. The very affordable $139 starting price point and vast library probably has a lot to do with the rapid rise of Kindle sales.

Meanwhile, Apple sold almost 7.5 million iPads from their April debut through September, and is expected to easily surpass the 10 million mark when the year is over. It’s hard to say how this affects Kindle sales – if at all – as Amazon has never seen Apple as a direct competitor in this segment. In fact, the company has its own app to let iPad owners buy a read books from the Kindle bookstore. The same is available for BlackBerry, Android, Mac OS X and Windows PCs, so it’s clear the company is in the business of selling e-books, and is fine with users reading them on whatever's at hand.