9 ms·

Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books

160 points by mikecane 15y ago

TomOfTTB 15y ago
For me this is a testament to intangible media. Items that you own but that require no space or attention (physical items need to be rearranged on occasion, dusted, etc...) I often find myself buying books I want to read in the future simply because it's only $10-$25 and I don't want to forget about them (I never liked the wish lists for whatever reason). Which is easy to do since there's no penalty in space (either disk or physical) I also find myself buying more from Amazon because I don't have to wait for shipping (and Kindle delivery actually makes getting the book faster than if I drove to the local Barnes and Noble) So for me the Kindle has shifted my book purchasing to e-books but it has also dramatically increased the amount I spend on books from Amazon.
- mahrain 15y ago
  In this case convenience trumps freedom, it seems. I find Richard Stallman's arguments against what he calls the "Swindle" being defective by design, and taking essential freedoms away from readers, such as the ability to buy a book anonymously using cash, lending a book to friends and keeping it as long as you want. Would it be that my first statement is true, or are consumers just not aware of this?
  - thalur 15y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but the arguments you list aren't things I would really consider at the time of purchase: I've never yet wanted to buy a book anonymously using cash, though I won't rule out wanting to do so in the future; the lack of/limited lending is a concern, but if the cost of the book is low (e.g. ~£1 like a lot of self-pub books are) then I would be happy to buy a copy instead of borrow one, and if I'm buying a book (of any sort) the lending potential of that book doesn't figure into my decision at all anyway.
  - simonsarris 15y ago
    That's like trying to compare the freedom of a car vs the freedom of a bicycle. It's not "taking away freedoms" if you buy The Catcher in the Rye Kindle Edition vs Print Edition It's purchasing a completely different thing. They have the same end, a lot of the time. You end up reading The Catcher in the Rye. One is cheaper and is easier to travel with, the other you can lend to your friends a lot easier. One dies if batteries die, the other gets warped pages. One can be taken into the bathtub with just a zip-loc bag to protect it, the other runs the risk of getting rippled pages. So it gives the "freedom" of being able to travel with ~500 books instead of 4, gives the freedom of easier bathtub reading, takes away the freedom of lending to friends, etc. It is simply a different product.
    - samlevine 15y ago
      From a practical perspective it doesn't take away any freedom. I try to avoid buying any ebooks I can't get DRM free copies of in case the DRM scheme they use changes or goes away and requires me to purchase a new license. Obviously I could just use the free copy to begin with but it wouldn't send any information to the people that make such books that I want more of them. Also the QA on such books can be a little light and format shifting them is a hassle I do if need be but would rather avoid.
    - Kadin 15y ago
      I don't think consumers are totally unaware of it. (Edit: Meant to be in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564228 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564228) I've had people (generally older, nontechnical types, but who aren't about to just trust that Amazon will be around forever) ask me whether it's possible to strip the DRM off of Amazon books. They may not know the term "DRM", but they understand it functionally and that it's a disadvantage. Unfortunately the de-DRMing tools are a little too complex and have too many rough edges for this audience, right now. (Although there's a Mac version that wraps most of the de-DRM scripts for Nook/Kindle/Adobe in a drag-and-drop GUI that is pretty clever.) I hope that developers of those sort of tools will keep ease-of-use by nontechnical people in mind in their development. Once you have the ability to strip the DRM and put the ebook file away in a safe place, you really have a product that is better in nearly all respects.
  - warmfuzzykitten 15y ago
    Actually, you can lend Kindle books. Paying cash is a "freedom" consumers give up willingly in every area of life. Why can't you keep a Kindle book as long as you want? Bit rot? I might add that consumers also give up the freedom to cut down trees to make paper, wait for physical delivery, have piles of books clutter up the house and periodically haul them away. I think they actually are aware of these.
bretthopper 15y ago
I'm still amazed at how fast these companies can add a new distribution model that surpasses the one they built their businesses on. Amazon: Kindle release: November 19, 2007 Date surpassed: ~May 2011 --- Netflix: Streaming started: Fall/Winter 2008? Date surpassed: ~November 2010
- simonsarris 15y ago
  What amazes me more is that Netflix began in 1997 and had the foresight to name themselves Netflix and not Mail-flix, yet they didn't begin streaming until 11 years later. I wonder how long they were working on streaming before it was released. A lot of planning must have gone into something that beat the company's traditional model in just two years.
  - anamax 15y ago
    I talked to NetFlix about streaming in 2004 and I got the impression that they'd been working on it for some time. (Thinking about streaming is no big deal - there were pre-99 startups working on streaming and Hastings surely knew about them.)
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      To be clear... there were pre-99 startups that DID streaming. I was invested in one. But B-movies from the 50s apparently have a smaller market than one might think -- and you probably already think it has a really small market.
      - officemonkey 15y ago
        Also, remember what video streaming was like in 99 (postage stamp-sized window, muddy picture, buffering every three seconds). The network has come a long way in 12 years.
  - solutionyogi 15y ago
    Personally, I don't think the 'Net' in NetFlix is about streaming. It's about the InterNET. Yes, the delivery mechanism was based on physical mail, but everything else was done on Internet [Browsing/Selection/Recommendations]. This is in contrast to B&M stores like Blockbuster. [I don't want to take anything away from Netflix, I have completely stopped using DVDs since they started streaming movies. They completely rule the online streaming market.]
MaxGabriel 15y ago
Its such a struggle for me deciding if I want print or Kindle. I'm doing research from these books usually so I need to be able to extract the text from them. For a print book, this involves a photography+OCR setup, which isn't that convenient but much quicker than transcribing. For Kindle, I have to transcribe because my OCR software screenshot reader only works on PC (which is 3 lbs heavier, is permanently married to an outlet, and sounds like an airplane taking off compared to my mac air). On the issue of price, usually kindle is pretty good but so far used books+amazon prime can beat that price.
- mikecane 15y ago
  FYI, for portable OCR, you might want to try: http://www.wizcomtech.com/eng/home/a/01/defaultpromo.asp http://www.wizcomtech.com/eng/home/a/01/defaultpromo.asp I own an old version. It's line by line, and accuracy depends on the typeface used, but I have generally loved having mine. (Sorry for the pop-up. It seems the URL will 404 without it.)
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  Kindle is a reflective display, right? So put it in the scanner.
  - MaxGabriel 15y ago
    Oh, that's actually a really cool idea! I use kindle for iPhone/PC/Mac though. I googled around for a few pages and didn't seen anyone doing that, but some of my relatives have a kindle so I could try out theirs sometime.
  - davidw 15y ago
    Or just use Kindle for PC, or Kindle's own 'notes' function...
    - esrauch 15y ago
      Doesn't the notes function has a limit to how much text you can save/publish? Or is is that just for what you can publish to the website?
patio11 15y ago
And the unit economics of Kindle books are so much better than print books to boot. No warehousing, no shipping, (negligible) returns, etc. Next up on the disruption bus: literary agents and book publishers.
- runevault 15y ago
  What is funny is agents are trying to become digital publishers to survive the shift. No, really.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    Why not? Given that you don't need a big publishing house, there's still room in the business for folks who are experts in taking a written piece and putting it into the ebook retailers, plus promoting it. A lot of authors want to write, not deal with selling. An agent could do this for a few dozen authors and have a perfectly valid business, with happy customers.
    - runevault 15y ago
      Because they are offering little real value (the vast majority of value publishers really offered was the advance, which I haven't heard of these guys offering, and distribution which you can do as well yourself thanks to Kindle + Nook stores). The one MAJOR cost left to self publishing if you are truly serious is editing, unless you are in a genre where stock image covers won't cut it. Giving up a % of sales revenue for the rest of time for a book considering the limited help they really offer these days is just silly. Dean Wesley Smith has been discussing this on his blog at length over time. http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/ http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/
      - roc 15y ago
        Promotion and connecting writers and editors is not an insignificant value. I don't know what cut they're trying to arrange for themselves, but these are services that the writer is going to pay for one way or the other.
chalgo 15y ago
This is just a sales spike due to the new user period. When a user gets a ebook reader for the first time they will buy lots of books to fill the device, including books they already own. Once sales to new users drops off the sales rate will also flatten out. I believe digital will ultimately be the bigger platform in future due to convenience of buying a book and getting it instantly (rather than waiting for the post man).
- Tichy 15y ago
  Not sure if the Kindle works the same way as an iPhone. I can see iPhone users buying lots of apps to show off their phone's capabilities, but ebooks look pretty much alike. So one is enough to show off the capabilities of the reader.
- JonLim 15y ago
  I went the opposite route - started out with buying nothing (pirated my books) and as I started slamming my way through books, I started buying the titles because they were better formatted and I wanted to support my favourite authors.
- rmc 15y ago
  Considering the Kindle has about 3GB of space, I doubt people will ever really fill it.
  - andfarm 15y ago
    Which is enough for two to three thousand thick books. And I believe that, unlike Apple, Amazon will let you delete and redownload books at will.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  This is the opposite of my experience: when I got my kindle, I bought one book, started reading it, and when I finished I bought the next. Over time, as I've become more confident that I'm going to use the Kindle long-term, I'm more willing to buy a book when I see it and "add it to the queue" rather than only buying when I need a new one. The nice thing is that there's really no penalty to waiting until the very last second to buy the next book, even if you're traveling (unless you're actually on the plane.)
AdamGibbins 15y ago
and yet we still have VAT on eBooks in the UK (whereas we don't on print books) :(
sdh 15y ago
I'm starting to get really annoyed that the price of some ebooks is actually more than the price of the printed book. That is just ridiculous and publishers better check their greed quickly if they want people to keep paying for books.
famousactress 15y ago
Interesting, unless I missed it the release doesn't specify how much of this is due to an overall decline in print sales, as opposed to a surge of Kindle ones. For instance, I've bought no books from Amazon in the past year (very a-typical for me, historically).. but I don't own a Kindle. I've bought some e-books from other outlets for my iPad. So I'm "contributing" to the success Amazon is touting in the release based on the way they're laying it out.
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  I'd take recent talk of a 'decline in paper book sales' with a very big pinch of salt. Book sales spiked, coincidentally, around 2007-08, however year-on-year sales are still going up. Why the coincidental 2007-08 date for one of the biggest spikes in print publishing? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it had 500% pre-sale figures of Half-Blood Prince. Despite being a supporter of ebooks, owning a Kindle and reading a lot, I still take Amazon's announcement with a whole bag of salt, because even a fistfull isn't enough for the inaccuracy allowed in their statement. Firstly to all those not-in-the-know, ebooks have solely been cannibalizing the sales of mass market paperbacks, which is why most major publishers are pricing them around the same price point. Why? Because mass market books are no longer paying off the editorial costs, which is the biggest Publisher cost in producing a book as your typical book passes through the hands of 3 editors and often multiple proof readers and the hands of an actual copy editor. By January 2011 figures from the AAP, total book (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio-books and audio-ebooks) were down 1.9% over January 2010. Adult Hardbacks fell 11.3%, paperback (note these are generally the paperback versions of books by known authors) fell by 19.7% and mass market paperbacks (IE new authors) fell 30.9%. Children's Hardbacks stayed the status quo at a fall of 1.9%. Children's paperbacks sell 17.7%. However, given eBook's 116% growth it likely helped skew the total book sale decline. Yet this isn't impressive yet as it attributes only 8.6% of total book sales. I'll be impressed when eBook sales hit what MP3 sales hit this year, which received little publicity - in that MP3 sales this year hit $5.7 billion. Physical sales hit $5.7 billion. IE MP3 has 50% sale share. It may be a sign of what's to come, but I expect another 5 years before eBook sales even hit the same as mass market paper backs, and that will only be through massive declines in MMPB sale figures. I'd say about 8 years for trade paperbacks (Stephen King and all your lovely crime novelists) to be matched. However, this isn't really going to be a huge game changer as the bigger the market gets the more important marketing becomes. This will mean, the same as it does today, that the vast majority of eBook sales will be coming from the same authors it is today, just in a bigger proportion.
metaobject 15y ago
Since kindle books are cheaper to create, store and deliver, and the fact that these books cost almost the same as the dead tree version, do the authors get a larger cut of the profits when a kindle book is sold compared to when a paper book is sold?
- javanix 15y ago
  It probably depends on who the publisher is. I would imagine smaller publishers would probably give better deals as a way to entice talent, whereas larger publishers like Random House would probably have a much bigger paper-publishing business to support and couldn't afford more generous terms.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    Any time you're using your new business to "support" the old business, you're doing it wrong. It should be the other way around - your old cash cow business should be used to support the new business that will take you forward.
petercooper 15y ago
Congratulations again Amazon. The Guardian already said "Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day" back in 2009.. :-) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-kindle-sales-surge http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-...
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  That was for a single day when many users began using the devices for the first time at the same time. What we're seeing here is a day after day pattern.
codex 15y ago
"Thursday’s announcement includes Kindle Singles, which are shorter pieces of writing, like a Fortune magazine article, and “no doubt helped them reach that ratio,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst for Simba Information."
ez77 15y ago
Aside: This looks like an official press release. If so, why doesn't Amazon issue it on the domain amazon.com? It would look more authentic.

160 points by mikecane 15y ago

For me this is a testament to intangible media. Items that you own but that require no space or attention (physical items need to be rearranged on occasion, dusted, etc...) I often find myself buying books I want to read in the future simply because it's only $10-$25 and I don't want to forget about them (I never liked the wish lists for whatever reason). Which is easy to do since there's no penalty in space (either disk or physical) I also find myself buying more from Amazon because I don't have to wait for shipping (and Kindle delivery actually makes getting the book faster than if I drove to the local Barnes and Noble) So for me the Kindle has shifted my book purchasing to e-books but it has also dramatically increased the amount I spend on books from Amazon.

mahrain 15y ago
In this case convenience trumps freedom, it seems. I find Richard Stallman's arguments against what he calls the "Swindle" being defective by design, and taking essential freedoms away from readers, such as the ability to buy a book anonymously using cash, lending a book to friends and keeping it as long as you want. Would it be that my first statement is true, or are consumers just not aware of this?
- thalur 15y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but the arguments you list aren't things I would really consider at the time of purchase: I've never yet wanted to buy a book anonymously using cash, though I won't rule out wanting to do so in the future; the lack of/limited lending is a concern, but if the cost of the book is low (e.g. ~£1 like a lot of self-pub books are) then I would be happy to buy a copy instead of borrow one, and if I'm buying a book (of any sort) the lending potential of that book doesn't figure into my decision at all anyway.
- simonsarris 15y ago
  That's like trying to compare the freedom of a car vs the freedom of a bicycle. It's not "taking away freedoms" if you buy The Catcher in the Rye Kindle Edition vs Print Edition It's purchasing a completely different thing. They have the same end, a lot of the time. You end up reading The Catcher in the Rye. One is cheaper and is easier to travel with, the other you can lend to your friends a lot easier. One dies if batteries die, the other gets warped pages. One can be taken into the bathtub with just a zip-loc bag to protect it, the other runs the risk of getting rippled pages. So it gives the "freedom" of being able to travel with ~500 books instead of 4, gives the freedom of easier bathtub reading, takes away the freedom of lending to friends, etc. It is simply a different product.
  - samlevine 15y ago
    From a practical perspective it doesn't take away any freedom. I try to avoid buying any ebooks I can't get DRM free copies of in case the DRM scheme they use changes or goes away and requires me to purchase a new license. Obviously I could just use the free copy to begin with but it wouldn't send any information to the people that make such books that I want more of them. Also the QA on such books can be a little light and format shifting them is a hassle I do if need be but would rather avoid.
  - Kadin 15y ago
    I don't think consumers are totally unaware of it. (Edit: Meant to be in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564228 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564228) I've had people (generally older, nontechnical types, but who aren't about to just trust that Amazon will be around forever) ask me whether it's possible to strip the DRM off of Amazon books. They may not know the term "DRM", but they understand it functionally and that it's a disadvantage. Unfortunately the de-DRMing tools are a little too complex and have too many rough edges for this audience, right now. (Although there's a Mac version that wraps most of the de-DRM scripts for Nook/Kindle/Adobe in a drag-and-drop GUI that is pretty clever.) I hope that developers of those sort of tools will keep ease-of-use by nontechnical people in mind in their development. Once you have the ability to strip the DRM and put the ebook file away in a safe place, you really have a product that is better in nearly all respects.
- warmfuzzykitten 15y ago
  Actually, you can lend Kindle books. Paying cash is a "freedom" consumers give up willingly in every area of life. Why can't you keep a Kindle book as long as you want? Bit rot? I might add that consumers also give up the freedom to cut down trees to make paper, wait for physical delivery, have piles of books clutter up the house and periodically haul them away. I think they actually are aware of these.

bretthopper 15y ago

I'm still amazed at how fast these companies can add a new distribution model that surpasses the one they built their businesses on. Amazon: Kindle release: November 19, 2007 Date surpassed: ~May 2011 --- Netflix: Streaming started: Fall/Winter 2008? Date surpassed: ~November 2010

simonsarris 15y ago
What amazes me more is that Netflix began in 1997 and had the foresight to name themselves Netflix and not Mail-flix, yet they didn't begin streaming until 11 years later. I wonder how long they were working on streaming before it was released. A lot of planning must have gone into something that beat the company's traditional model in just two years.
- anamax 15y ago
  I talked to NetFlix about streaming in 2004 and I got the impression that they'd been working on it for some time. (Thinking about streaming is no big deal - there were pre-99 startups working on streaming and Hastings surely knew about them.)
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    To be clear... there were pre-99 startups that DID streaming. I was invested in one. But B-movies from the 50s apparently have a smaller market than one might think -- and you probably already think it has a really small market.
    - officemonkey 15y ago
      Also, remember what video streaming was like in 99 (postage stamp-sized window, muddy picture, buffering every three seconds). The network has come a long way in 12 years.
- solutionyogi 15y ago
  Personally, I don't think the 'Net' in NetFlix is about streaming. It's about the InterNET. Yes, the delivery mechanism was based on physical mail, but everything else was done on Internet [Browsing/Selection/Recommendations]. This is in contrast to B&M stores like Blockbuster. [I don't want to take anything away from Netflix, I have completely stopped using DVDs since they started streaming movies. They completely rule the online streaming market.]

MaxGabriel 15y ago

Its such a struggle for me deciding if I want print or Kindle. I'm doing research from these books usually so I need to be able to extract the text from them. For a print book, this involves a photography+OCR setup, which isn't that convenient but much quicker than transcribing. For Kindle, I have to transcribe because my OCR software screenshot reader only works on PC (which is 3 lbs heavier, is permanently married to an outlet, and sounds like an airplane taking off compared to my mac air). On the issue of price, usually kindle is pretty good but so far used books+amazon prime can beat that price.

mikecane 15y ago
FYI, for portable OCR, you might want to try: http://www.wizcomtech.com/eng/home/a/01/defaultpromo.asp http://www.wizcomtech.com/eng/home/a/01/defaultpromo.asp I own an old version. It's line by line, and accuracy depends on the typeface used, but I have generally loved having mine. (Sorry for the pop-up. It seems the URL will 404 without it.)
JulianMorrison 15y ago
Kindle is a reflective display, right? So put it in the scanner.
- MaxGabriel 15y ago
  Oh, that's actually a really cool idea! I use kindle for iPhone/PC/Mac though. I googled around for a few pages and didn't seen anyone doing that, but some of my relatives have a kindle so I could try out theirs sometime.
- davidw 15y ago
  Or just use Kindle for PC, or Kindle's own 'notes' function...
  - esrauch 15y ago
    Doesn't the notes function has a limit to how much text you can save/publish? Or is is that just for what you can publish to the website?

patio11 15y ago

And the unit economics of Kindle books are so much better than print books to boot. No warehousing, no shipping, (negligible) returns, etc. Next up on the disruption bus: literary agents and book publishers.

runevault 15y ago
What is funny is agents are trying to become digital publishers to survive the shift. No, really.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  Why not? Given that you don't need a big publishing house, there's still room in the business for folks who are experts in taking a written piece and putting it into the ebook retailers, plus promoting it. A lot of authors want to write, not deal with selling. An agent could do this for a few dozen authors and have a perfectly valid business, with happy customers.
  - runevault 15y ago
    Because they are offering little real value (the vast majority of value publishers really offered was the advance, which I haven't heard of these guys offering, and distribution which you can do as well yourself thanks to Kindle + Nook stores). The one MAJOR cost left to self publishing if you are truly serious is editing, unless you are in a genre where stock image covers won't cut it. Giving up a % of sales revenue for the rest of time for a book considering the limited help they really offer these days is just silly. Dean Wesley Smith has been discussing this on his blog at length over time. http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/ http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/
    - roc 15y ago
      Promotion and connecting writers and editors is not an insignificant value. I don't know what cut they're trying to arrange for themselves, but these are services that the writer is going to pay for one way or the other.

chalgo 15y ago

This is just a sales spike due to the new user period. When a user gets a ebook reader for the first time they will buy lots of books to fill the device, including books they already own. Once sales to new users drops off the sales rate will also flatten out. I believe digital will ultimately be the bigger platform in future due to convenience of buying a book and getting it instantly (rather than waiting for the post man).

Tichy 15y ago
Not sure if the Kindle works the same way as an iPhone. I can see iPhone users buying lots of apps to show off their phone's capabilities, but ebooks look pretty much alike. So one is enough to show off the capabilities of the reader.
JonLim 15y ago
I went the opposite route - started out with buying nothing (pirated my books) and as I started slamming my way through books, I started buying the titles because they were better formatted and I wanted to support my favourite authors.
rmc 15y ago
Considering the Kindle has about 3GB of space, I doubt people will ever really fill it.
- andfarm 15y ago
  Which is enough for two to three thousand thick books. And I believe that, unlike Apple, Amazon will let you delete and redownload books at will.
tomkarlo 15y ago
This is the opposite of my experience: when I got my kindle, I bought one book, started reading it, and when I finished I bought the next. Over time, as I've become more confident that I'm going to use the Kindle long-term, I'm more willing to buy a book when I see it and "add it to the queue" rather than only buying when I need a new one. The nice thing is that there's really no penalty to waiting until the very last second to buy the next book, even if you're traveling (unless you're actually on the plane.)

AdamGibbins 15y ago

and yet we still have VAT on eBooks in the UK (whereas we don't on print books) :(

sdh 15y ago

I'm starting to get really annoyed that the price of some ebooks is actually more than the price of the printed book. That is just ridiculous and publishers better check their greed quickly if they want people to keep paying for books.

famousactress 15y ago

Interesting, unless I missed it the release doesn't specify how much of this is due to an overall decline in print sales, as opposed to a surge of Kindle ones. For instance, I've bought no books from Amazon in the past year (very a-typical for me, historically).. but I don't own a Kindle. I've bought some e-books from other outlets for my iPad. So I'm "contributing" to the success Amazon is touting in the release based on the way they're laying it out.

electromagnetic 15y ago
I'd take recent talk of a 'decline in paper book sales' with a very big pinch of salt. Book sales spiked, coincidentally, around 2007-08, however year-on-year sales are still going up. Why the coincidental 2007-08 date for one of the biggest spikes in print publishing? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it had 500% pre-sale figures of Half-Blood Prince. Despite being a supporter of ebooks, owning a Kindle and reading a lot, I still take Amazon's announcement with a whole bag of salt, because even a fistfull isn't enough for the inaccuracy allowed in their statement. Firstly to all those not-in-the-know, ebooks have solely been cannibalizing the sales of mass market paperbacks, which is why most major publishers are pricing them around the same price point. Why? Because mass market books are no longer paying off the editorial costs, which is the biggest Publisher cost in producing a book as your typical book passes through the hands of 3 editors and often multiple proof readers and the hands of an actual copy editor. By January 2011 figures from the AAP, total book (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio-books and audio-ebooks) were down 1.9% over January 2010. Adult Hardbacks fell 11.3%, paperback (note these are generally the paperback versions of books by known authors) fell by 19.7% and mass market paperbacks (IE new authors) fell 30.9%. Children's Hardbacks stayed the status quo at a fall of 1.9%. Children's paperbacks sell 17.7%. However, given eBook's 116% growth it likely helped skew the total book sale decline. Yet this isn't impressive yet as it attributes only 8.6% of total book sales. I'll be impressed when eBook sales hit what MP3 sales hit this year, which received little publicity - in that MP3 sales this year hit $5.7 billion. Physical sales hit $5.7 billion. IE MP3 has 50% sale share. It may be a sign of what's to come, but I expect another 5 years before eBook sales even hit the same as mass market paper backs, and that will only be through massive declines in MMPB sale figures. I'd say about 8 years for trade paperbacks (Stephen King and all your lovely crime novelists) to be matched. However, this isn't really going to be a huge game changer as the bigger the market gets the more important marketing becomes. This will mean, the same as it does today, that the vast majority of eBook sales will be coming from the same authors it is today, just in a bigger proportion.

metaobject 15y ago

Since kindle books are cheaper to create, store and deliver, and the fact that these books cost almost the same as the dead tree version, do the authors get a larger cut of the profits when a kindle book is sold compared to when a paper book is sold?

javanix 15y ago
It probably depends on who the publisher is. I would imagine smaller publishers would probably give better deals as a way to entice talent, whereas larger publishers like Random House would probably have a much bigger paper-publishing business to support and couldn't afford more generous terms.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  Any time you're using your new business to "support" the old business, you're doing it wrong. It should be the other way around - your old cash cow business should be used to support the new business that will take you forward.

petercooper 15y ago

Congratulations again Amazon. The Guardian already said "Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day" back in 2009.. :-) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-kindle-sales-surge http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-...

jacques_chester 15y ago
That was for a single day when many users began using the devices for the first time at the same time. What we're seeing here is a day after day pattern.

codex 15y ago

"Thursday’s announcement includes Kindle Singles, which are shorter pieces of writing, like a Fortune magazine article, and “no doubt helped them reach that ratio,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst for Simba Information."

ez77 15y ago

Aside: This looks like an official press release. If so, why doesn't Amazon issue it on the domain amazon.com? It would look more authentic.