

Kindle books have overtaken paperbacks as the most popular format on Amazon - jonknee
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110127006667/en/Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Sales-36-12.95

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ghshephard
Paper books are going the way of film - though it's about three or four years
ahead of the curve that I predicted when I got my first Kindle.

People still use film to take pictures, and people will continue to buy paper
books - but as the format improves, the resolution and page changing gets
better, and the battery life increases, "Paper Books" will become more an more
niche - I think people are going to be absolutely shocked how quickly tablets
wipe out the paper textbook market.

I originally predicted (in 2007, when I got my first kindle - a laughable
device compared to my K3 (or Ipad+Kindle, for that matter) - that eBooks would
overtake Paper books as the most popular format in 2015 - eight years seemed
like a reasonable time span based on previous transitions (Vinyl->CD,
VHS->DVD). Then three years to pick up the late majority, and finally another
three years to reduce paper books to a tiny niche - 2021 would have us all
reading books on electrical devices. Given that 2012 looks like it will be the
year eBooks become more popular (Give it a full two years after they become
the most popular on Amazon), It looks like that prediction was off - pull
everything in by about three years. 2018 - The year people will look at you
funny if you are reading a paper book.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens to all of our libraries...

~~~
Kaizyn
The problem though is that paper books still cost less money than their Kindle
counterparts.

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bhousel
Wow, this is great news for my weekend startup, Booklends. I think that the
'try before you buy' model will work great for eBooks. So I'm creating a
website <http://www.booklends.com> to let Kindle users borrow and lend books
with other users.

Certain books (depending on if the publisher allows it) can be loaned from one
user to another for up to 14 days. Booklends will let you keep track of all
your books and let you make wishlists of books that you want to borrow from
other people.

My site is coming together quickly, now I just have to get it finished and
launched! :)

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tghw
Hopefully this isn't a surprise, but there's one out there:
<http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/>

Though I do like your name better.

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bhousel
Haha, yeah it's not a surprise.. I didn't know they were creating their own
site - I thought they wanted to just keep it as Facebook group. But by the
time they launched, I was well into it, so I decided that I may as well finish
what I started.

~~~
tghw
> so I decided that I may as well finish what I started.

I like the spirit. I'll keep an eye on booklends. Hopefully it will be fewer
romance novels and more good books.

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bhousel
Thanks! I'm going to try to just support all the books that are lendable.

But to your point - I've found that there is a _surprising_ amount of
romance/erotica novels on Amazon Kindle. I have my crawlers doing common
searches, and it turns out that a large number (more than I'd expect anyway)
of the books on there are of the shirtless-dude-on-the-cover type.

~~~
jdminhbg
With a Kindle, nobody else on the bus knows what you're reading...

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jacquesm
How big a portion of the total number of books sold world wide goes through
Amazon?

That's an important number in this debate, you could easily interpret this as
'ebooks are now sold more frequently than paperbacks' but I'm not seeing
bookstores going out of business in the towns that I visit so there must be
more to it.

Another question that needs answering is how many of these ebooks would have
been sold as paperbacks, and how many of them are really sold just on the
merit of being available as an ebook.

Typically I'll read anything technical on a screen and 'books' in dead tree
format, and I pass my copy on to someone else after I'm done with it. As long
as ebooks do not allow me to do that given the price I'd much rather have a
'real' book than a stream of bits, it seems more value for money.

~~~
jonknee
> That's an important number in this debate, you could easily interpret this
> as 'ebooks are now sold more frequently than paperbacks' but I'm not seeing
> bookstores going out of business in the towns that I visit so there must be
> more to it.

In the US, bookstores are going out of business at a rapid pace. Borders is
nearly insolvent, Barnes & Noble is on a long slump (the only thing that may
save them is eBooks). Independent bookstores have been declining for at least
a decade if not two.

~~~
robryan
Stores can be fairly resilient in the face of terrible trading conditions for
some years, especially the big chains. So there is some lag time between a
business model becoming unworkable and the companies pursuing it disappearing.

~~~
sliverstorm
Plus, bookstores are a relatively slow business in the first place. Even a
healthy bookstore doesn't sell anywhere near as many books in a day as, say,
McDonalds does hamburgers.

They are used to and designed to handle slow sales, so it's taking a long time
for this to kill them.

~~~
rkudeshi
I'm not saying I disagree, but I don't think it's a fair argument to compare a
non-essential "luxury" item (books) to food, a necessity (especially when the
former costs $10+ and the latter is roughly $1 each).

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martinkallstrom
Is it just me, or has this been an extremely swift market transition from
physical towards digital? Even counting that it is only Amazon we're talking
about?

The transition from film to digital cameras was very quick once it happened,
but my feeling is that ebooks were adopted sooner after mass-market devices
became available. Anyone got numbers?

Would be interesting to compare with Netflix's transition from DVD to
streaming as well!

~~~
bhousel
I've thought about this too. Amazon sold _millions_ of Kindles this past
holiday shopping season.. Why? I personally know 6 people who got Kindles or
Nooks in the last month.

It would be interesting to know what contributed to their 'overnight' success.
Perhaps there's something magic about the $139 price point, which I suspect is
about what a serious reader might spend on paper books every year anyway
(Nobody has better data on this than Amazon)..

Also there weren't really any other big ticket, must have items this holiday
season - no game consoles launching.

Like I said, it would be really interesting to know why this transition
happened so suddenly, and why now..

~~~
robryan
The $139 price point makes them a good gift, about the amount you may be
looking to spend on someone close to you. I got mine because my girlfriend was
asking what I wanted for Christmas and it's about that price point where if
you decided later you didn't like it it's not a huge deal.

Interestingly in the space of half a book I've pretty much decided the vast
majority of my future purchases will be ebooks despite being someone who
initially questioned whether books would easily transition to digital.

~~~
RickHull
Yep, the $139 price point did it for me. I bought myself one for Thanksgiving
;)

I've bought like 15 ebooks since then, and now if it's not available for
Kindle, I just won't buy a book.

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dantheman
I'm wondering how many of those are free - a lot of classics are free on
kindle.

For instance: Robinson Crusoe [http://www.amazon.com/Life-Adventures-Robinson-
Crusoe-ebook/...](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Adventures-Robinson-Crusoe-
ebook/dp/B002RKR7N4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296167853&sr=8-1)

~~~
tjr
The article says that free books are not included in this count of sales.

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asr
Just to clarify for any others who misread the title, this is comparing
paperbacks to Kindle edition, not all paper books. The numbers imply Kindle
sales are about 85% of hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Also, since Amazon sells 100% of the Kindle books its readers buy, but only
some of the physical books its readers buy, I think this most interesting part
of this release is what it says about how great a business move the Kindle was
for Amazon. Every time a customer switches to the Kindle they instantly gain a
lot of sales that used to happen at various physical bookstores. And that's
before even considering that people who walk around with a bookstore 1 foot
from them will buy more books, too.

~~~
jeremydavid
I think you may be mistaken

 _Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the
beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the
Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period
the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This
is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books
where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if
included would make the numbers even higher._

~~~
erikpukinskis
100 paperbacks ~= 115 kindle books ~= 40 hardcover books (33% of 115)

140 paper books ~= 115 kindle books => ~82% as many kindle books as paper
books

~~~
jeremydavid
Oops.

Thank's for the explanation :) Perhaps Amazon's words are intentionally
ambiguous.

EDIT: Actually, I just read TechCrunch's article

 _Has the pixel to print tipping point been reached? Last July we reported
that Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of
sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Now that lead
also holds for paperbacks and by default all books, with 115 Kindle books
being sold for every hundred paperbacks._

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/kindle-books-overtake-
paper...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/kindle-books-overtake-paperback-
books-to-become-amazons-most-popular-format/)

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kmfrk
I don't really see the death of print as something imminent, but the
convenience of e-books might make them more preferable to a lot of people.

My actual question is if the decline in brick and mortar book shops will just
fuel a print-on-demand industry instead?

Granted, the price for production and shipping can only be so low - MagCloud
is completely non-viable for someone living in my part of Europe due to
shipping rates.

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radioactive21
There is a tactic that Amazon has been doing that frustrates me and might
contribute to why kindle books are selling so well.

Search for a book, if there is a kindle edition, it will be the one that shows
up on the search NOT the paperback. You have to navigate around just to get to
the paperback.

~~~
jonknee
It doesn't do that for me, but it's not that far off since the kindle version
is the best selling version. They may also boost Kindle results if you have
purchased a Kindle before (that would actually be pretty clever).

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jjcm
Hopefully the older publishers will change the way that they deal with digital
books now that the medium is becoming (has become?) mainstream. I know many
publishers will offer lump sums to authors to publish digitally, but wont give
any royalties (despite the often equivalent pricing).

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ericmsimons
Wow. It seems like yesterday that eBooks were just becoming somewhat well
known...thanks to Bezos and Jobs for nailing this major accomplishment in such
a short amount of time!

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jrockway
What did Jobs do? The Kindle was massively popular before the iPad was
conceived. In fact, Jobs derided Amazon for releasing the Kindle.

~~~
ericmsimons
The iPad brought eBooks to ~8 million people within the past year. I may not
be an Apple fanboy (I'm a PC), but the iPad is making eBooks much more common.
To be clear, I'm not talking about iBooks, I'm talking about the iPad as a
reading device.

