Timely news given my New Age of Publishing series of guest blogs currently running. The figures are a bit messy as hardbacks aren’t included, but overall sales of paid Kindle books are outselling paperback books at a ratio of 115:100 through Amazon.com. The company says:
Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books.
This is across Amazon.com’s entire US book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.
Given that this is a piece of US-centric news, it would be interesting to see how global figures affect the ratios. But regardless of vagaries in statistics, one thing is clear: Ebooks are mainstreaming faster than most predicted.
The Kindle ereader is the single biggest selling product on Amazon, though Kindle edition books are obviously available on a variety of devices. I read a lot of Kindle books on my iPhone, for example. Anyone still denying the ebook revolution is certainly kidding themselves.
This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.