New York Times: E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon
Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.
Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.
In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.
The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.
Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.
The shift at Amazon is “astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months,” the chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said in a statement.
Still, the hardcover book is far from extinct. Industrywide sales are up 22 percent this year, according to the American Publishers Association. …
One of the things I wonder about is how e-books affect different genres. I'm not a big fiction reader. If I had a Kindle, I might read more fiction because I don't want to pay for a hard copy that clutters my life, and I don't want to go to the library to find fiction.
Most of what I buy is for learning and reference. I write notes in books and highlight key points. I still haven't seen an electronic version that works as well for me as having the hard copy. I suspect that there are others like me. So I wonder if some non-fiction genres will leap as quickly. We will see what technological innovations emerge, but I'm still buying almost exclusively hard copies.
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