Amazon sells 1m Kindles a week – but shares still fall

Online retailing giant Amazon saw its shares slide as much as 3 per cent yesterday despite claiming to have sold a record one million Kindlee-reader devices a week around the world during December.

Shares fell $5.71 to $168.18 after analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast that Amazon's 38 per cent growth rate would fall short of Wall Street's expectations of 40 per cent growth.

The Kindle e-reader, a rival to Apple's iPad tablet, was the best-selling item on Amazon in America between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Amazon said the Kindle was also its top seller in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. But an Amazon UK spokesman declined to give any figures for British sales for its £89 Kindle.

The top-selling book across all formats was Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. The top-selling video game was Just Dance 3.