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Amazon's digital book sales pass paperbacks
DIGITAL BOOK SALES have overtaken sales of paperbacks on Amazon.com, meaning that fairly soon hardcopy books will become rarer.
In reporting its latest earnings, Amazon said that it is selling more Kindle ebooks than paperback books.
Since January 1, for every 100 paperback books that Amazon sold, it sold 115 Kindle books. Since the beginning of the year it has sold three times as many digital books as hardcovers.
Amazon's statement said that the data was from "across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition."
The situation could be much better for digital books because Amazon excluded the popular free Kindle books from the figures.
It has been estimated that Amazon sold more than 8 million Kindles last year and then there are those who try to read books on the LCD screens on tablets and phones.
Amazon said it had 810,000 books in the Kindle Store and that doesn't include the millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books that are also available as ebooks
All this could be bad news for the book barns that have operated successfully in the United States for the last 20 years and more. Already they are suffering in the same way that the big record stores have. It is also bad news for printers, which are seeing demand for their services drying up. Publishing companies will also feel the pinch because their markups are higher on printed books.
Books will still be published, of course, but it looks like they might become a niche thing from smaller publishers. µ
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The article says:
"... Publishing companies will also feel the pinch because their markups are higher on printed books"
Yes and no. The trade off is that there are LESS costs associated with this new type of medium. However, one common problem I see relates to their pricing schemes. It seems that all companies STILL want to charge the same amount, which is wrong. This especially applies to software publishers. The proper model would be to reduce the price to those who choose NOT to receive a physical copy by at least 10-15-20%.
Considering the source of these statistics, should we trust it given that Kindle is an Amazon device, and they'd do anything to promote Kindle? I don't know a single person that owns a Kindle, hard to believe this is accurate. Give me these statistics from an independent source, otherwise very questionable. And the commenter above is correct, don't understand the "3x" stat.
There's this rare type of book called a paperback, perhaps you've heard of it?
"for every 100 paperback books that Amazon sold, it sold 115 Kindle books.
Since the beginning of the year it has sold three times as many digital books as hardcovers"
115 / 100 = 1.15
three times as many = 3
1.15 =/= 3
am I missing something in the calculation above?