Amazon has great reasons to brag this morning. They had absolutely stellar earnings, reason alone to be proud. But CEO Jeff Bezos let another reason slip: apparently “millions of people own Kindles”! Take that, Barnes and Noble!

TechCrunch hit up their sources for more details, and found out the exact amount is somewhere around 3 million Kindles sold. In addition, Amazon says they sell 6 Kindle versions for every 10 paper versions of a given book. And that does NOT include freebie books!

What does this mean? Well, for starters, it means Amazon is in a far better position to fend off the iBook army versus, say, Barnes and Noble. If Kindle owners are reading that much, it means they have a pretty big library. They are far more likely to use the Kindle for iPad app over iBooks, simply because they already have a high investment in Amazon’s ecosystem. I also think this makes Amazon LESS likely to hurry any switch to ePUB…people don’t mind buying into a closed format, and Amazon isn’t going to make it easy to walk away.

Plus, with a base of a few million readers, Amazon has more bargaining power than Apple right now; according to Engadget, even the power of Steve Jobs couldn’t get Apple to pricing parity with Amazon!

Via teleread