Larry Dignan, ZDNET:

Amazon’s fourth quarter sales missed projections, but earnings were ahead. The big wild card was Kindle device sales, which tripled over the holidays.The e-commerce giant reported earnings of $177 million in the fourth quarter, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $17.43 billion, up 35 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 17 cents a share on revenue of $18.25 billion.

Larry says “Kindle sales surged” and “Kindle sales tripled over the holidays.” But then Larry points out that “As per Amazon custom, no hard numbers were disclosed.” So how do you know sales have surged and tripled?