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.
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These might be partly skewed because the Kindle store has a lot more shorter, cheaper titles, eg. they’re now selling their “single” collection which is an essay of 5K-30K words for a few $. Also they have a lot of public domain books in Kindle format for free so I just “bought” like 50 of them.
Yeah, the figures are muddy for a lot of reasons. Free books weren’t included, so that doesn’t affect things. The balance would be miles out if they were.
But there are lot of novellas and short stories on there for 0.99c, which people will buy for the sake of a quick read. eBook readers are a lot more experimental as a rule and will try things out because they’re a lot cheaper and easier to get than print books, so much more sampling goes on. I’ve bought things for 99c that I would never have bothered buying for a few dollars in print form. But still, the trend is interesing nonetheless.