According to the International Business Times, the Kindle Fire has secured more than 250 000 pre-orders in the last five days.

The news site refers to leaked screenshots on tech blog dubbed the cultofandroid, of Amazon’s internal inventory, which suggest that the e-commerce site has been accepting an average of 50 000 pre-orders a day since the Kindle Fire’s launch last week. However, we are inclined to take the figure with a pinch of salt – the blog appears to be down at the time of writing.

The Kindle Fire is only expected to be available stateside though by 15 November, just in time for the busy holiday shopping season. The International Business Times suggests that if true, and if this pre-order spree continues for the next five weeks, Amazon would have already exceeded the two and a half million sales mark by the time the device is actually available for purchase.

Additionally, the lack of the rumoured iPhone 5 could benefit Amazon this November and December, as users may instead consider buying a new Kindle rather than a new iPhone. The other factor playing to its favour is the startling prices on offer for Amazon’s new Kindle range, with the top-of-the-range Fire priced at $199 (R1600).

The device sports a 1 GHz TI OMAP dual-core CPU, 512 MB of memory, and 8 GB of internal storage, along with a full colour LCD touchscreen. Perhaps of even greater interest to users may be the Kindle Fire’s deep integration with Amazon’s digital content, such as movies, TV shows, songs, ebooks, graphic novels, magazines and newspapers.

The previous Kindle enjoyed unprecedented popularity, at least before the iPad was launched. Whether Amazon can successfully challenge the iPad in terms of sales this holiday season however, remains to be seen.