Amazon has announced that it is now selling more Kindle books than physical books. They have been outselling hard-back books for some time, but since the new year Amazon has been selling 115 Kindle ebooks for every 100 paperback books too. These are US statistics (amazon.com) but I would imagine they are a trend that is similar here in the UK. This also excludes Kindle Free Books, which would skew the number in further in the favour of ebooks.
This swing in 2011 will be largely part to the huge reduction in price of the Kindle devices (now down to just £111 for the WiFi model), leading to huge sales of the device as a Christmas gift, and the knock on effect of new Kindle owners hungry for ebooks. But it is also down to Amazon cleverly making the Kindle software available on just about every platform going, from fixed devices like PCs and MACs to all the mobile OS’s – Windows Phone 7, Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad) the Kindle Software is available for them all.
I don’t own a Kindle, and I never will, I like to travel light and minimise the amount of electronic devices I travel with, for me my iPad is my ‘must have’ device – almost more than my iPhone and voice call usage drops and data usage increases. But I have the Kindle software loaded on both my iPad for ‘proper’ reading, and my iPhone for moments when I want to grab 5 minutes reading. I love reading on the iPad, its large lit display makes reading in bed easy, my Incipio Kickstand case (highly recommended) puts the iPad at just the right position and turning the page requires one finger swipe.
Amazon doesn’t state how these sales numbers are derived, are they to Kindle devices, or other devices running Kindle Reader software? Either way Amazon won’t mind, their big Kindle price reduction was always aimed to be subsidised by increased ebook sales anyway, which is where the revenue is for them long term.
Of course the huge swing could also be attributed to the recent opening of the Amazon.it website, you can’t get those Italians out of their books!
Source: Amazon News Release
About Rob Gordon
This post was written by Rob Gordon, an IT geek, gadget lover and blogger. Rob has been using the internets since 1994 when the only streaming video was that coffee pot in Cambridge (rip).... Follow Rob on Twitter - @robgordon
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