UPDATE: The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon.

It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

My original post described how Amazon plans to offer XO Laptops as part of OLPCs “Give One, Get One” program where you essentially pay for two of the devices, keep one and let OLPC ship the other one to a child in a developing country.

Today’s statement from Amazon adds a few more details, starting with, why the switch to Amazon:

“Although the first iteration of the ‘G1,G1’ program was extremely successful and sold more then 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.”

Secondly, Amazon spelled out that although OLPC has talked about working with Microsoft, Windows is not part of this offering.

“Contrary to some media reports, it will be a Linux-based XO Laptop that will be offered as part of the global initiative and not a dual-boot machine running both Windows and Linux,” OLPC said in a statement.