Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
New York Times
Published: July 19, 2010
The heft and musty smell of a hardcover book are one step closer to becoming relics in a museum.
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest bookstores, said Monday that for the last three months, sales of electronic books for the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, outnumber sales of hardcover books for the first time.
The fact that e-books are now outsell hardcover books is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.
In the last three months, Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcover books for which there is no Kindle edition. That increased to 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books in the last month.
The Kindle sales figure does not include free Kindle books, of which there are 1.8 million originally published before 1923 available for downloading.
Amazon does not disclose how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales still probably outnumber e-books.
Book buyers who do not own a Kindle can read their Kindle books on a variety of devices, including laptops, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android phones.
But even with the popularity of the iPad, which Apple has marketed as a leisure device for reading and which has its own e-book store, sales of the Kindle are growing, Amazon said.
Kindle sales increased each month in the second quarter, the same period that Apple began selling the iPad, and the growth rate tripled after Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 in late June, Amazon said. That came after Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook e-reader to $199 from $259.
During approximately the same period, Apple said it sold three million iPads. Amazon’s stock price is down about 16 percent in the last three months, in part because of investor concerns that the iPad threatened Kindle sales.
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