

Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books - mikecane
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1565581&highlight=

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bretthopper
I'm still amazed at how fast these companies can add a new distribution model
that surpasses the one they built their businesses on.

Amazon:

Kindle release: November 19, 2007

Date surpassed: ~May 2011

\---

Netflix:

Streaming started: Fall/Winter 2008?

Date surpassed: ~November 2010

~~~
simonsarris
What amazes me more is that Netflix began in _1997_ and had the foresight to
name themselves Netflix and not Mail-flix, yet they didn't begin streaming
until 11 years later.

I wonder how long they were working on streaming before it was released. A lot
of planning must have gone into something that beat the company's traditional
model in just two years.

~~~
anamax
I talked to NetFlix about streaming in 2004 and I got the impression that
they'd been working on it for some time. (Thinking about streaming is no big
deal - there were pre-99 startups working on streaming and Hastings surely
knew about them.)

~~~
kenjackson
To be clear... there were pre-99 startups that DID streaming. I was invested
in one. But B-movies from the 50s apparently have a smaller market than one
might think -- and you probably already think it has a really small market.

~~~
officemonkey
Also, remember what video streaming was like in 99 (postage stamp-sized
window, muddy picture, buffering every three seconds).

The network has come a long way in 12 years.

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patio11
And the unit economics of Kindle books are so much better than print books to
boot. No warehousing, no shipping, (negligible) returns, etc.

Next up on the disruption bus: literary agents and book publishers.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I wonder how much this is true. I'm not doubting it, per se, but this is
always argued when digital vs. analog comes up and I think it's a little
presumptuous to say so. Let's consider this example:

1) It takes a big infrastructure to manage an eBook store. Amazon has to be
able to deliver books at near instantaneous speeds. They have to deliver
magazines and newspapers at a scheduled time (time is critical).

2) Amazon provides 3G delivery to (many of) its customers for free. It's not
free for Amazon.

3) Amazon already has built up warehousing/delivery infrastructure and must
maintain it because their retail business isn't going away. The cost of
delivering a single book is not the same as for Barnes & Noble.

~~~
potatolicious
1) Bigger than having a bunch of warehouses spread all over the world, fully
staffed, with logistics and inventories to worry about? It seems unlikely this
is smaller than the infrastructure for digital deliveries.

2) "free" in the same way your coffee might be "free" with the purchase of a
bagel...

3) True, but let's taked away all the fixed costs (and presume the warehouses
would have existed anyways, which may or may not be true). There are still
plenty of variable costs - storage space costs money, handling costs labour,
and shipping cannot be escaped (and is expensive!)...

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sdh
I'm starting to get really annoyed that the price of some ebooks is actually
more than the price of the printed book. That is just ridiculous and
publishers better check their greed quickly if they want people to keep paying
for books.

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TomOfTTB
For me this is a testament to intangible media. Items that you own but that
require no space or attention (physical items need to be rearranged on
occasion, dusted, etc...)

I often find myself buying books I want to read in the future simply because
it's only $10-$25 and I don't want to forget about them (I never liked the
wish lists for whatever reason). Which is easy to do since there's no penalty
in space (either disk or physical)

I also find myself buying more from Amazon because I don't have to wait for
shipping (and Kindle delivery actually makes getting the book faster than if I
drove to the local Barnes and Noble)

So for me the Kindle has shifted my book purchasing to e-books but it has also
dramatically increased the amount I spend on books from Amazon.

~~~
mahrain
In this case convenience trumps freedom, it seems. I find Richard Stallman's
arguments against what he calls the "Swindle" being defective by design, and
taking essential freedoms away from readers, such as the ability to buy a book
anonymously using cash, lending a book to friends and keeping it as long as
you want.

Would it be that my first statement is true, or are consumers just not aware
of this?

~~~
simonsarris
That's like trying to compare the freedom of a car vs the freedom of a
bicycle.

It's not "taking away freedoms" if you buy The Catcher in the Rye Kindle
Edition vs Print Edition

It's _purchasing a completely different thing_.

They have the same end, a lot of the time. You end up reading The Catcher in
the Rye.

One is cheaper and is easier to travel with, the other you can lend to your
friends a lot easier. One dies if batteries die, the other gets warped pages.
One can be taken into the bathtub with just a zip-loc bag to protect it, the
other runs the risk of getting rippled pages.

So it gives the "freedom" of being able to travel with ~500 books instead of
4, gives the freedom of easier bathtub reading, takes away the freedom of
lending to friends, etc.

It is simply a different product.

~~~
Kadin
I don't think consumers are totally unaware of it. (Edit: Meant to be in
response to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564228>)

I've had people (generally older, nontechnical types, but who aren't about to
just trust that Amazon will be around forever) ask me whether it's possible to
strip the DRM off of Amazon books. They may not know the term "DRM", but they
understand it functionally and that it's a disadvantage.

Unfortunately the de-DRMing tools are a little too complex and have too many
rough edges for this audience, right now. (Although there's a Mac version that
wraps most of the de-DRM scripts for Nook/Kindle/Adobe in a drag-and-drop GUI
that is pretty clever.) I hope that developers of those sort of tools will
keep ease-of-use by nontechnical people in mind in their development.

Once you have the ability to strip the DRM and put the ebook file away in a
safe place, you really have a product that is better in nearly all respects.

------
MaxGabriel
Its such a struggle for me deciding if I want print or Kindle. I'm doing
research from these books usually so I need to be able to extract the text
from them. For a print book, this involves a photography+OCR setup, which
isn't that convenient but much quicker than transcribing. For Kindle, I have
to transcribe because my OCR software screenshot reader only works on PC
(which is 3 lbs heavier, is permanently married to an outlet, and sounds like
an airplane taking off compared to my mac air).

On the issue of price, usually kindle is pretty good but so far used
books+amazon prime can beat that price.

~~~
jonknee
Isn't the Kindle's DRM is pretty easy to break? You shouldn't have to OCR
Kindle books.

~~~
tghw
Yes, it is. <https://github.com/danielgtaylor/kindledecrypt>

~~~
ay
Did this work for you on the latest versions ? I tried a couple of these
programs - but none worked. There was a voodoo trick which involved running
the kindle on windows (which I do not have) and snarfing the book from within
memory while it is decrypted... It reportedly worked, but I could not check
because I do not have Windows.

For myself I found an approach which I might finish sometime: Kindle on wine,
a small X application that takes a screenshot of the Kindle window, OCRs it
via tesseract, and then sends the emulated "right" keypress. The OCR quality
was pretty good, of course I'd lose the formatting, but then no need to worry
about Next DRM Format.

Just to clarify: all of the above is for purely being able to search/copy,
etc. from the contents. I love the auto-sync capabilities to a point that when
I see a pdf of some book that interests me, I go and try to buy a kindle
version. But the DRM is the most annoying thing since the nail in the shoe :)

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codex
"Thursday’s announcement includes Kindle Singles, which are shorter pieces of
writing, like a Fortune magazine article, and “no doubt helped them reach that
ratio,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst for Simba Information."

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famousactress
Interesting, unless I missed it the release doesn't specify how much of this
is due to an overall decline in print sales, as opposed to a surge of Kindle
ones.

For instance, I've bought no books from Amazon in the past year (very
a-typical for me, historically).. but I don't own a Kindle. I've bought some
e-books from other outlets for my iPad. So I'm "contributing" to the success
Amazon is touting in the release based on the way they're laying it out.

~~~
electromagnetic
I'd take recent talk of a 'decline in paper book sales' with a very big pinch
of salt. Book sales spiked, coincidentally, around 2007-08, however year-on-
year sales are still going up. Why the coincidental 2007-08 date for one of
the biggest spikes in print publishing? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
it had 500% pre-sale figures of Half-Blood Prince.

Despite being a supporter of ebooks, owning a Kindle and reading a lot, I
still take Amazon's announcement with a whole bag of salt, because even a
fistfull isn't enough for the inaccuracy allowed in their statement.

Firstly to all those not-in-the-know, ebooks have solely been cannibalizing
the sales of mass market paperbacks, which is why most major publishers are
pricing them around the same price point. Why? Because mass market books are
no longer paying off the editorial costs, which is the biggest Publisher cost
in producing a book as your typical book passes through the hands of 3 editors
and often multiple proof readers and the hands of an actual copy editor.

By January 2011 figures from the AAP, total book (hardcover, paperback, ebook,
audio-books and audio-ebooks) were down 1.9% over January 2010. Adult
Hardbacks fell 11.3%, paperback (note these are generally the paperback
versions of books by known authors) fell by 19.7% and mass market paperbacks
(IE new authors) fell 30.9%. Children's Hardbacks stayed the status quo at a
fall of 1.9%. Children's paperbacks sell 17.7%.

However, given eBook's 116% growth it likely helped skew the total book sale
decline. Yet this isn't impressive yet as it attributes only 8.6% of total
book sales. I'll be impressed when eBook sales hit what MP3 sales hit this
year, which received little publicity - in that MP3 sales this year hit $5.7
billion. Physical sales hit $5.7 billion. IE MP3 has 50% sale share.

It may be a sign of what's to come, but I expect another 5 years before eBook
sales even hit the same as mass market paper backs, and that will only be
through massive declines in MMPB sale figures. I'd say about 8 years for trade
paperbacks (Stephen King and all your lovely crime novelists) to be matched.
However, this isn't really going to be a huge game changer as the bigger the
market gets the more important marketing becomes. This will mean, the same as
it does today, that the vast majority of eBook sales will be coming from the
same authors it is today, just in a bigger proportion.

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chalgo
This is just a sales spike due to the new user period. When a user gets a
ebook reader for the first time they will buy lots of books to fill the
device, including books they already own. Once sales to new users drops off
the sales rate will also flatten out. I believe digital will ultimately be the
bigger platform in future due to convenience of buying a book and getting it
instantly (rather than waiting for the post man).

~~~
rmc
Considering the Kindle has about 3GB of space, I doubt people will ever really
fill it.

~~~
andfarm
Which is enough for two to three thousand _thick_ books. And I believe that,
unlike Apple, Amazon will let you delete and redownload books at will.

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petercooper
Congratulations again Amazon. The Guardian already said "Amazon customers
bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day"
back in 2009.. :-)

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-
ebook-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/28/amazon-ebook-kindle-
sales-surge)

~~~
jacques_chester
That was for a single day when many users began using the devices for the
first time at the same time.

What we're seeing here is a day after day pattern.

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AdamGibbins
and yet we still have VAT on eBooks in the UK (whereas we don't on print
books) :(

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metaobject
Since kindle books are cheaper to create, store and deliver, and the fact that
these books cost almost the same as the dead tree version, do the authors get
a larger cut of the profits when a kindle book is sold compared to when a
paper book is sold?

~~~
javanix
It probably depends on who the publisher is. I would imagine smaller
publishers would probably give better deals as a way to entice talent, whereas
larger publishers like Random House would probably have a much bigger paper-
publishing business to support and couldn't afford more generous terms.

~~~
tomkarlo
Any time you're using your new business to "support" the old business, you're
doing it wrong. It should be the other way around - your old cash cow business
should be used to support the new business that will take you forward.

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ez77
Aside: This looks like an official press release. If so, why doesn't Amazon
issue it on the domain amazon.com? It would look more authentic.

