By Joel Hruska
August 04, 2008 - 12:05AM CT

Amazon's Kindle has enjoyed apparently robust popularity since it debuted last fall; the first run of the eBook reader sold out, even at the initial $399 price point, and Amazon had only limited inventory for some time. The company later cut the unit's price to a marginally more acceptable $359, a move that must have spurred some additional sales.

But how many units was Amazon actually moving? Newly-reported data suggests that Kindle sales over the past nine months may have exceeded Amazon's expectations, and made the company a killing in the process. Exact data on Kindle sales figures has been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped on such topics, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date.

Sitting on that information may not be an option any longer; TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon, with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold some 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated revenue between $86 million and $96 million dollars.

Kindle's strong sales have galvanized the eBook market, and Amazon itself is developing a new series of Kindle products. The details of the update, however, have yet to be announced, which means we don't know yet if we'll see a hardware/software refresh of the existing Kindle, a new "Kindle 2.0" hardware design, or a new, student-oriented Kindle aimed directly at the textbook market.