The folks over at Media Post have posted a question that I myself have wondered about on many occasions:

If the Kindle is selling so well, why doesn’t Amazon back up its boasting with some actual dollar or unit sales instead of leaving analysts and everyone else to guess? It is a publicly traded company after all. Consider Apple, not known for a corporate culture dedicated to transparency, regularly discloses unit sales for devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod. That’s what hardware companies are supposed to do.

Once again, Amazon is bragging about their Kindle sales yet offering no substantiation. Media Post reports Amazon announced that the “sales of the new generation of lower-priced Kindle devices introduced in July had already outpaced total Kindle sales for the fourth quarter of 2009.” They continue:

Obviously, cutting the price of the basic model to $139 and the 3G version to $189 has helped boost sales. Amazon threw out some other benchmarks highlighting the health of its digital book business: Kindle sales continue to outpace print book sales, at a rate of 2 to 1 for bestselling titles; e-book sales in the first eight months of 2010 grew faster than the 193% growth rate for the industry as a whole; and the company sold three times as many e-books in the first nine months of the year than the same period a year ago.

Problem is, nobody know exactly how many eReaders this represents. And Amazon isn’t telling. Apple says they sold 4 million iPad’s this last quarter. Something tells me, that’s more than the Kindle….