Kindle enjoyed a
healthy press run at launch

Amazon has released its fourth quarter earnings, which reflected an earnings jump of 42 percent — to $5.67 billion — from the same time last year. Profits doubled to $207 million.

For the entire year, revenues grew by 39 percent to $14.84 billion, marking Amazon's fastest annual growth rate since 2000.

Amazon's successful quarter was attributed to the launch of its online data and storage service, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Bandwidth use of the services beat those of all Amazon's global websites combined.

Founder Jeff Bezos also said the Kindle e-book reader is "outpacing our expectations." The company is scrambling to keep up with demand, reports The Guardian.

Last month, the company succeeded in signing all four major labels for its DRM-free mp3 music store, which will launch internationally later this year.