E-Books Outsell Hardcovers, Amazon Says

Amazon is touting some very interesting stats. The online retailer is saying that for the past three months e-book sales in the site have surpassed sales of hardcover books and by a significant margin. Amazon is not revealing any actual numbers and it has shied away from this in the past, but the fact that’s it’s saying anything at all is surprising. Obviously, the fact that it’s selling more e-books than hardcover books is significant, but the iPad threat probably had a lot more to do with the decision to release this data.

"We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle--the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189," Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon said. "In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books--astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."

Amazon is now saying that for the past three months, e-books have been outselling hardcover books by 1.43 to one. The company is also selling three times more e-books now than it did just one year ago. And the rate is increasing, in the past month it sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers. These numbers are just for the e-books sold, Amazon also has 1.8 million public domain titles offered for free and these downloads are not added to the count. It has over 630,000 e-book titles on sale.

What Amazon is trying to say is that its business is thriving and, even more so, that the Kindle device is doing great. It feels the need to do this because dedicated e-book readers are under a direct threat from multi-purpose devices, like the iPad, tablets or even smartphones. But comparing e-books to hardcovers is not necessarily relevant. People who buy hardcovers buy them for the experience. People who buy e-books buy them for the convenience. So it’s safe assume that sales of paperback books on Amazon.com will outpace e-books and hardcovers for quite some time to come.