Amazon: We sell more books in Kindle format than hardcover.

Amazon today released an announcement boasting that sales of the Kindle device have tripled since the unit price dropped from $259 to $189. And with that, a related piece of news. Founder Jeff Bezos: "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."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Spinkter

Dear Publishers: Please get with the program. Please stop making me buy physical media when I want read a book. For most (99%) books I read, I read them exactly one time; I’d rather license them as ebooks than make room for dead trees.
Againagain

What a relief! To finally be spared the discomfort of lending and sharing books, not to mention the urban blight that is the used bookstore…

And Mellowknees, I couldn’t agree more, especially if you’re already buying the more costly paper format.
Anonymous

i’m not sure this is that impressive, given that paperbacks make up the majority of book sales. hardcover’s been a niche business for a while now, no?
Christian

So far Amazon has refused to release any concrete numbers on Kindle reader or book sales. All Bezos does is posture. And everybody sucks it up. I would have expected BoingBoing to be a bit more critical. But then one would have to ask why you guys use Amazon to sell your Bazar stuff.

Another question no one here bothered to answer back when it was anounced. This is troubeling in light of Amazon’s documented disregard of writers and publishers plus its labor policies and union busting activities.

Care to comment BB?
Donald Petersen

I love my Kindle. I like having all the free public domain stuff on it that I may or may not ever get around to reading but at least takes up no actual space in my house. Y’see, I also love real physical books. I just spent many long hours building an 8′x10′ bookcase in my house that now holds a wee fraction of all the books my wife and I have been stashing in our basement and garage since we bought our house. And as time permits, I intend to build more shelving. But the Kindle is great for bathroom reading, and airplane reading, and hammock reading, and it’s aces for the junky crap I like to read but don’t need to fill up precious bookshelf footage with. Like all those Star Wars paperbacks I collected in the 90s. Or the Aliens and Halo books I read now. Hey, I read respectable stuff, too. But I read so much stuff that the Kindle is a great place to stash the more embarrassing crapola and guiltier pleasures.
Anonymous

@ Vidya108 — there are lots of apps for the iPad that you can use to take notes (typing, handwriting, or even voice dictation). You can copy and paste between many apps. And there are apps that do a really good job of displaying PDFs including some which allow annotations to be added to the document. Personally I prefer reading documents in PDF as they preserve the layout, fonts, and graphics the way the publisher intended.

I’ve played with various ebook readers in stores and got a Sony PRS 700 about a year ago — but what really works is the iPad. Trying to read PDFs on the Sony just doesn’t work but on the iPad it works brilliantly. And having a full colour touchscreen, plus all the other apps (most being quite cheap to buy) makes it more useful in many ways than ebook reader competitors.

Other ebook readers will need to do at least as much as an iPad, at least with regard to ebooks, PDFs, etc., if they want to have any lasting power in the market.

I really hope that publishers (particularly of textbooks and nonfiction) grab this golden opportunity to sell PDF versions of their books as I could easily see iPads or something similar becoming standard for academic work. Carrying an iPad filled with dozens or even hundreds of textbooks with full search capabilities (and maybe even with multimedia components built into them) would beat carrying printed textbooks any day.
ifthenwhy

I have a ridiculously huge library of hardcover books.
Many of them are irreplaceable first editions, specially packaged limited runs and volumes that only an obsessed completist like myself could gather. I love them like children.

Yet I also LOVE my iPad book reader, as I have come to discover over the years that some books are just not worthy to sit in my library. So I buy these disposable books electronically. Often they are popular culture and “summer reads”.

If I find I’m really loving the book I’m reading via iPad then I’ll usually just buy it and add to the analogue collection. This equals less crap more prized chunks of lit to lend or covet.

Win Win. My collection doesn’t get bloated with books of fleeting interest, and I get to read even more crud that I may have passed on due to my limited and prized library space.

Zeros and Ones rule!
Anonymous

While I do not mind the convenience of modern technology, it just does not stand to reason that Kindle will replace the printed book. I have books that were printed in the 16th century and they are just as readable today as 400 years ago. Find a Kindle that will deliver in 400 years!
kshusker

I am no luddite, but I still prefer printed books to electronic ones.

Here’s the obligatory link to a recent blog post I made about this exact subject

http://www.mikesilverman.com/redletterday/2010/07/paper-please/

Fundamentally, there are too many weaknesses to e-books (DRM, incompatible formats, bizarre pricing) to overcome the real strengths of print (more choice, lasts longer, the pleasure of collecting)
rmundo

Buying a book that is made from paper made from cut trees, shipped halfway across the world to where I currently live, in Asia, and finding extra room to fit it and all my stuff, AND then have it become dusty and moldy in a decade or two because of all the moisture. Paperback version of a certain new book I wanted cost almost 30USD

VS.

Downloading it off the internet onto my iPad/Kindle. That same book on iBooks costs less then 12USD.

For a heavy reader overseas, it really isn’t much of a decision. I think ebooks can still be cheaper than they currently are, though.
elfspice

as someone who has been reading texts off the internet since the early days (my first notable reads were ‘the anarchist’s handbook’, ‘the terrorists cookbook’ and hakim bey’s ‘temporary autonomous zone’ circa 1992-1994. the former two were passed on to me from school mates in my IT class and the latter i discovered through one of the first ISP services in australia, APANA), i can honestly say i never would have heard of temple of psychick youth, chaos magick, and a number of other neat things were it not for digital texts. i for one say it’s about time that people realised that dead trees and toxic chemicals binding finely powdered charcoal carbon is not the only way to read. hurrah!
cmonsour

Amazon didn’t say their “sales” tripled; they said the “the *growth rate* of Kindle device unit sales has tripled” (emphasis mine). Big difference.
Anonymous

I bought a kindle to use at work… For $189 it rocks for this purpose. Almost all of my equipment manuals now come as PDFs and all of my training documents do as well. Having all of that on my kindle rocks. Some of these documents are thousands of pages and being able to search the PDF and scale it makes this a much more efficient way to carry around information. I was previously using my iPhone to do this, but the kindle works better and has like a two week battery life! I considered an IPad and still do… But the kindles cellular is free and the iPad’s would cost $30/month extra so that makes the decision real easy! One data plan per account really ought to cover all devices with the same carrier…but that’s another post :)

RMG
Xopher

I’m not buying anything from Amazon if I can possibly avoid it. Period.

They’ve fucked over too many of my friends. I’ll buy from brick & mortar stores, or from Barnes & Noble online.
Anonymous

Powell’s Books FTW
monopole

I won’t touch the kindle w/ a 10′ pole but I love my Sony PRS600 Touch in conjunction with Calibre. now I always have something to read in my pocket. I’ve been reading ebooks since my first Visor handheld while also having innumerable dead tree books.
My Android tablets are excellent for reading as well particularly with Aldiko and direct downloads from feedbooks. But sony wins out for direct sunlight reading and battery life.
While I prefer dead trees for permanence, I’ve developed a preference for ebboks simply for the volume of books I can run through.
CG

I don’t have a problem with ebook readers. I have a problem with the prices of ebooks. They’re the same price as real books! I’d rather have something physical that I actually own than something digital that I license for the same price.

The loss of rights and added limitations needs to come with a lower price. It is an inferior product after all.
Meadslosh

I recently received a Barnes & Noble nook as a birthday present (in part because the person who gave it to me had heard me discuss why I thought the nook seemed like a better product than the Kindle), and I absolutely love it, for a variety of reasons.

As much as I like real paper-and-glue books, I don’t miss adding to the weight of the STUFF I have to carry around whenever I move.
Bureaucromancer

“I’m very curious on how they factor in the $0.00 Kindle books into their math.” They don’t, completely excluded from these stats.

Frankly this doesn’t surprise me, just look at the prices. New release fiction is being sold at softcover prices in electronic editions while the price of hardcovers is showing no signs of coming down. With this kind of price differential of course the switch to digital is going to happen faster for hardcover fiction.
arikol

I’ve read approximately 3500 pages of text on my iPhone in the last week. That’s 3500 pages in the original books, I’ve no idea how many screens that
translates to after it gets reformatted for the screen size.
It’s a pleasant experience, and super convenient. I have my books with while I’m waiting for stuff, I can set to night mode for low light conditions (which does not wake my wife up even if I read in bed) and never lose my place.

It’s not as nice as real books in some ways, that new book feeling (or the other, lovely, old book muskiness) is missing. It’s (supposedly) impossible to share books among your friends (yeah, sure). Furthermore, when reading novels I find that most novels don’t lose anything by being in electronic format.
I’ve even bought from Amazon, and was very pleased at being able to get that book instantly.
If they give me a hassle if I want to move it to other devices, well, there’s always a torrent available somewhere..
Anonymous

I buy my books from a bookstore. I can see what I am getting. I do not have to give up any personal information to register. I do not have to wait for delivery. I can pass it on to someone else or resell it.
Anonymous

Wake me up when e-books outsell paperbacks, Jeff.

I buy books from a local bookseller, who is willing to order anything I ask for (from Girl Genius comic books to the fragments of Posidonius in library edition).

Greg pays local taxes which support my community infrastructure (including roads, schools, and firemen) and he’s a member of the community swimming pool my kids use and the local Better Business Bureau and he buys food from local vendors which helps keep the market open and competitive.

When I’ve finished reading a book, I either shelve it for re-reading later, or I donate it to the local school library. When they are done with it, they sell it for a quarter from a table on the sidewalk and use the money to buy ice cream for the kids once a year at the reading festival.

I certainly understand why you’d buy from Amazon if you don’t have a real local bookstore. I bought my signed copies of Zelazny & Bode from Amazon, and I buy other things (like chain saw guards) that I can’t get locally.

But personally I prefer to be part of a functional, cyclic ecosystem of readers and reading rather than a dead-ended sump.
jamiethehutt

I’ve just gotten a Cybook Opus from Bookeen and I’ve fallen in love with it. Saw a few kindles and thought they were far too big and clunky but this is perfectly sized (4″x6″) and has worked really well.

It does (if you use MobiPocket) do dictionary lookups but I’ve found I only actually want them for foreign or old English words, you know words that aren’t actually in the dictionary…

Also the Bookeen has no pointless keyboard, I’ve never had the urge to made a note on a book in my life so, for me, that keyboard is really useless. One of the guests in the hotel I’ve been working at had a kindle, when he got it he though he’d use the keyboard to make notes for bible studies and in his own words “It’s too little and fiddly, it’s far quicker to write the notes in another book”…

Oh and if you’re thinking of getting an ereader then you’ll really want Calibre, it’s a really great ebook manager that can translate and tag files and even downloads news for your reader.

So basically I, and many others, love ereaders but the kindle is actually a pretty crap one.
Anonymous

Since I got my iPad I much prefer digital books. I’ve bought quite a few kindle books for my iPad.
carljohnson

That IS astonishing, considering I don’t know a single human being who owns a Kindle. Not one.
- mdh
  
  I know two avid book readers who have not purchased a paper book since getting their kindles, and will gladly never go back.
  
  I still prefer paper, and I suspect we’ll have both for a while.
Anonymous

Every book I look for on Amazon is NOT available on Kindle. I’ve wasted over Â£100 on this useless machine. What is the point of requesting a book to be available when there is absolutely no response to requests
MrJM

Note to Jeff Bezos: You don’t SELL Kindle books, you license them.

Note to Amazon customers: You don’t OWN Kindle books, you license them.

Sorry for any confusion.
Vidya108

It’s about a year since I first started seriously considering buying an e-reader, but I still haven’t seen anything that meets my needs as a graduate student.

The ones with nice, sharp readouts don’t have a touchscreen and stylus for highlighting and annotation. The one (Sony Touch) that does have a touchscreen has glare issues which would, I think, play havoc with my increasingly poor vision. ASUS apparently has a clearer touchscreen something-or-other coming out eventually, but no word on the cost. I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether or not the iPad lets you annotate books, but it’s out of my price range anyways. And no one building a serious annotated ‘lifetime’ academic library wants to get stuck with DSM/proprietary issues, either. Furthermore, a number of these products aren’t even available/supported outside of the US.

There’s a HUGE worldwide market of students and academics to whose needs no product yet seems to cater, something which baffles me.
mellowknees

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE it if modern hardbacks came with a free digital or Kindle copy. I find that I frequently buy both! I LOVE books, especially hardbacks, but I dislike having to tote them around, especially when I’m reading more than one at a time. The Kindle is much more convenient for reading on the go. :)
politeruin

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

I ask again: why would you want a kindle when they pull crap like this?
franko

we live in exciting times.
Richard

My iPhone solves the buy a kindle problem.

Considering that this cheap version of the kindle is not all that much bigger than my iPhone – well ok it’s about 2x as big.

Even my friend who thought a kindle sounded great for that price, was less than enthused by the size and sent it back last week.

We should ask Amazon how many keep the new smaller sized units.
Zagrobelny

Lots of people sell paper books. Amazon is the only place for Kindle books. Nothing surprising here.

If Kindle books outsold paper books *everywhere*, then that would be impressive.
stwaldo

I wonder if the number “sold” includes the free books available on the Kindle store – right now those far outnumber the paid books I have on my Kindle app, plus I’m reading classics I’ve never read before!
Anonymous

I actually just bought a Kindle last week. I live in Japan, so to get English language books either requires a trip to Osaka, to pay for a lot of postage to get the book imported from Amazon or another book store, or choose from the limited selection of Japan-based English book websites. In addition, my tiny bookshelf is already full of books.

As much as I love physical books, they do me no good. They’re either a hassle or expensive, and I’ve simply got nowhere to put them!

I know people like to bash e-readers because they don’t look/feel/smell like a regular book, but for me, the conveniences outweigh those luxuries.
- Anonymous
  
  kokoroko;
  You are correct. I’ve tried also reading some books on iPad but it hurts my head after about 15 minutes; so Kindle is much more convenient and the size resembles a small Moleskine sketchbook (the A5 size) and has no glear when reading. I do not miss color that much bt I would not sacrifice it if unable to reproduce it without glare. All these LCd and similar screens (eg my Iphone) are not good except for a few minutes to check something up. Therefore Kindle is very good. I’m hoping it will improve so I can read many manga books (perfect size for it) on it and other comics too. Most color comics are colored very badly with computers and therefore I rather read them in black and white so I can feel and see the original art.
  
  I’m also waiting for medical books to go cheaper and I will buy those too. One day i may get rid of my bookcases hehe.
seric

I’m very curious on how they factor in the $0.00 Kindle books into their math. You still technically Buy/License these through the shopping cart before having them delivered to your device.