By Chris Scott Barr
The Kindle has been on sale for a little less than three years, but it has already begun to revolutionize the way we read books. That’s not to say it’s the only player on the market, but its appetizing price and feature list helped jump-start the e-reader craze. But just how popular are ebooks? Apparently they’re more popular than hardbacks, according to Amazon.
In the last three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold. They were not including free ebooks in the figures, or else they would be considerably higher. What’s even more interesting is that there are now five authors who have sold over 500,000 ebooks through Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.
While at first this news may lead you to believe that old-fashioned paper books are going the way of the dodo, that’s not the case just yet. The statistics given only stated a comparison between hardback books and ebooks. There is no mention of paperbacks, which generally sell at much higher rates due to their cheaper price.
How many of you have jumped on the ebook bandwagon? I’ve purchased roughly a dozen of them since I picked up my iPad a couple of months ago. Surprisingly, they were all copies of books that I already own in hardback form. They’re just great books that I enjoy being able to carry with me. I don’t think that these devices are going to kill off the paper book entirely, it’s just another way to make literary works more accessible to people.
[ Amazon ] VIA [ TechCrunch ]
