Did Amazon Sell 500,000 Kindles Last Year?

Amazon will unveil its long-awaited Kindle 2.0 next Monday at a press conference in New York. The real question, though, is how many of the original version has Amazon already sold?

Jeff Bezos and the people over at Amazon like to keep us guessing.

Not to worry, Mark Mahaney says that he knows.  The analyst from Citigroup claims that Amazon sold 500,000 Kindle devices in 2008.  He estimates that the Kindle, which he likes to call the “iPod of the Book World,” will become a $1.2 billion business by 2010.

He may be right.

He arrives at the 500,000 number using a filing by Amazon partner Sprint, which handles the wireless network for the e-books.

He comes up with the $1.2 billion number by assuming that Kindle growth will be similar to that of Apple’s iPod many years ago, and that Kindle users will buy a digital book every month.

Bring on Kindle 2.0.