14 DAY TRIAL // It's been some time coming, yet it happened sooner than even Amazon anticipated, the company now sells more ebooks than paperback books. Amazon revealed this in its quarterly financial report, though it still didn't say how many Kindles, or ebooks it sold in this time. Still, it shows that digital copies are not only a real alternative to books, they're now preferred by Amazon customers.
"Thanks to our customers, we achieved two big milestones," Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said.
"We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com," he said.
While Amazon didn't say how many Kindles it sold, this has been one of the big unknowns ever since the company started selling its own devices, it did say the number was in the millions.
Previously, Amazon said that the Kindle was the single best selling product on the site, over the holidays.
It seems that, despite the apparent competition from tablets, especially the iPad, some people still prefer to read books on a device that was built for that.
"Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected - and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales," he detailed.
When Amazon first started talking about ebook sales versus real ones, the comparison wasn't exactly fair or relevant. Hardcover books have a different market than ebooks and people have different reasons for buying them.
But now that Amazon sells more ebooks than regular ones, considering that the company did start as online book seller, it's clear that the Kindle has been a huge success.