Amazon Offers Direct Sales of iPad Alongside Kindle?
While Target may be the latest brick-and-mortar retailer to begin selling the iPad, now comes word giant online retailer Amazon is also stocking the popular tablet device. Amazon, which also makes the rival Kindle e-reader, until recently offered customers Apple’s latest product via third-parties.
According to the Seattle-based company’s website, Amazon directly ships and sells the 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi versions. The move was made unannounced, except for various online news sites, such as 9 to 5 Mac, which picked-up on the change.
Target began selling the iPad over the weekend. Late last week, the retailer confirmed it would begin offering the all Wi-Fi configurations and one 3G version. The addition of Amazon means buyers bypass sales tax in most states, plus get free shipping.
Prior to the Amazon news, Fortune figured the iPad is available in 25 countries, 1,743 Target stores, 1,093 Best Buy locations and 221 U.S. Apple stores, along with a smattering of overseas spots. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster recently said the iPad would overtake the Mac by 2011 in number of points of sale. That appears to have already happened.
The biggest retail shoe not to fall is Walmart. If the world’s largest retail does indeed carry the iPad in “some U.S. Stores” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this year, the number of outlets available to buy the tablet could double. Walmart has 2,815 U.S. locations and 774 Walmart Discount stores.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.![Read "From Your iPhone, With Love: Thank You Pen Does What Cards App Can’t [Feature]"](http://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "Read \"From Your iPhone, With Love: Thank You Pen Does What Cards App Can’t [Feature]\"")
