Posted on 07/20/2010 1:19:19 PM PDT by abb
The Amazon.com Kindle e-reader and bookstore have reached a "tipping point," the company said Monday, with Kindle titles outselling hardcover books on the massive online marketplace for the first time.
"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," Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in an announcement release, referring to last month's price drop for the device. "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."
And Kindle titles continue to outpace hardcovers, statistics from Amazon showed. In the past three months, 143 Kindle books were sold for every 100 hardcovers, but when that time frame is narrowed to a month, it's 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers. Total e-book sales tripled from the first half of 2009 to the first half of 2010.
This comes despite months' worth of claims of naysayers who speculated that Apple's sophisticated iPad might render obsolete e-readers like the Kindle. But with prices higher in Apple's iBooks store than for many Kindle titles, and a Kindle app available for both the iPad and iPhone, the supposed death of the Kindle seems far less imminent. Some have even surmised that the discrepancies between the devices may play to Amazon's hand rather than Apple's.
Amazon is slated to announce its second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and analysts are speculating that it'll post an extremely strong quarter.
I didn’t say anything about what’s on Kindle. I’m just saying that passing hardcover isn’t as big a milestone as they’re trying to say. Hardcover sales have always been a small portion of book sales, the book industry revolves around paperbacks, cheaper to buy and less shelf space.
As for Kindle itself, eh. I like books. E-book just plain doesn’t interest me in any way. Not as long as I can go to the library book sale and buy 3 tote bags of books for $40. $180 for a reader just doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. Glad you like it, but I will be the last person on earth to get one, probably a couple of weeks after I get a cellphone.
And Kindle devices aren’t needed to read Kindle titles. You can download a reader from Amazon for use on your PC.
If that happens, reading as a leisure activity will likely be a rather low priority.
I’m still somewhat sentimental. I don’t buy too many hardcover books or even new ones unless someone buys them for me as a Christmas or birthday present, so I usually wait until I can find a used copy in paperback.
Seeing as how I’ve become a lot cheaper recently, I find the kindle to be far too expensive for my little frugal crusade.
No, I can’t blame them. There must be some reason that these books occupy 90%+ of the shelf space in every single store around here. Sucks for me though, because I am just looking for a good thriller or horror type of novel.
No. Amazon Kindle’s sales are driven by price.
The “call back” function to wipe the material off your device at the publisher or Amazon’s request is a sticking point for me. It should also be a concern for the politically incorrect. Publish a book, distribute on millions of eReaders, have the publisher or Amazon cave on censorship, and with an IT command, the reading material disappears off those screens.
The print books, however, are still in human hands and available to their minds.
By print books of material at risk of recall or censorship - it will be the only way to keep it. And to check against the endless editing that the digital world is increasingly subject to.
I am familiar with this topic. I wrote: Amazon Kindle Publishing for Idiots Expanded Edition
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle-Publishing-Expanded-ebook/dp/B002B50FRK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1279658150&sr=8-1
Not good for the paper industry either (which I just retired from after 35 years)
My thoughts also. Kindle and the other devices are a nice portable device that can be easily carried and are great vehicles for those types of books that I pass on or sell when I’m done. Good luck reading them when BO brings us all 5 hours of power a day and/or you have no way of recharging them. We’ve had weather related power outages that have lasted days and I could still read my books while the handheld devices died quickly.
FUBO
Myself. Over the past three years, my older sister (a packrat like me) has got me going to all the library book sales that happen all over the place. I've got boxes and shelves of unread books!
I’d wholeheartedly disagree. I’m not too keen on kindle, especially not when they can make text change and disappear. Too much similar to the ‘memory hole’, and other arguments that you cannot control information on books, but you can control information on these little e-readers.
I wouldn’t personally buy one. However, I did like using project gutenburg to acquire my readings for university, and building a reader for myself. It saved me thousands of dollars over a four year education.
Among other things, most Romance "novelists" get paid next to nothing.
I can agree with this. I have one of the first thousand or so Kindles that were sold. I love and I use it every day. And so far I have bought a little over 500 titles for it so far. And in the last two years I have gone to E-Books exclusively. It just makes sense for me to have my entire library in one hand.
I also have around 60 file boxes of books down on the garage that I am working on selling or donating. As a Kindle version of one of those titles comes available I buy it. With many of the titles in storage going back to the 40’s and 50’s that is going to take some time. Of course I just bought a Lester Del Rey collection for 99cents as a E-Book. What a deal!
And of course as always there are some exceptions to that rule. Any Survival/Prepping type of book is also bought in hard cover. If TSHTF then electricity to charge the Kindle may be hard to come by.
One little ol’ EMP and all kindle type platforms are worthless. That said, I’d love to have a kindle. ;o)
http://www.onesecondafter.com/
Unless you’re reading a book on carpentry, farming or a Chilton’s guide to your 1998 Chevy Lumina.
Books, the paper kind, ARE HERE TO STAY.
I know a lot of sf/f/h authors and it drives them nuts. The first question they get asked by publishers these days when they bring in a new book is “is there anyway we can market this as romance”, because that’s where the money is. That’s why we have Twilight and the various smutty vampire stuff, because it turns out romance readers are perfectly cool with mixing genres. Annoys me to no end though, reading a perfectly good horror book and all of a sudden everybody is trying to get in everybody else’s pants.
Great observation.
I have no interest in squinting at some tiny screen, either. The OldPossum's just low-tech.
“So the other person has to buy a Nook too?”
B&N also has a reader for your PC, Mac, etc., and the digital books can be read using that application. So you could lend a book from your Nook for someone to read on their laptop...
Actually, acid-based paper is not very durable. Check out a fifty-year old paperback and see how brittle are the pages. True, it can be archived, but it takes some expertise.
All that said, I myself LOVE books. Here I sit in my home office surrounded by shelves and boxes overflowing with books. I have a Nat Geo collection that goes back to about 1939.
I posted the article for discussion and debate purposes. It has done that, LOL!
True. But not all reading is leisure. There is a great deal of reference material that would be useful after a societal collapse.
I love, love, LOVE my Kindle. It instantly downloads my fave blogs, including American Spectator, Townhall, SHTFplan, and National Review Online. Last week I purchased Larry Schweikart’s book, A Patriot’s History of the United States. (Larry is a fellow Freeper.) Since I have my Kindle with me everywhere I go, it’s just easier to read his book via Kindle than the actual book at 960 pages!
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