Kindle book sales surpass print on Amazon UK
August 8, 2012
(Credit: Amazon.com)
Amazon says it sells more books for Kindle than paperbacks and hardbacks combined on Amazon.co.uk, TechWeek Europe reports.
Amazon said that for every 100 print books bought through its UK site, it sold 112 Kindle books. Free Kindle books were excluded from the calculations and if included would have made the gap even wider, Amazon said.
“We hit this milestone in the U.S. less than four years after introducing Kindle, so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle,” said Jorrit Van der Meulen, vice president for Kindle EU.
Comments (6)
by Ron Abate
I would not be surprised to see the development of dual screen technology where tablets and e-readers merge.
by MatthewQ
I wonder if this includes books sold in the Amazon community by third party shops/people? To be honest, I buy most of mine this way because they’re usually cheaper.
I like my Kindle too, though.
by eldras
Wow this really surprised me.
Longer term books will be autowritten by weak a.i.s
There are already systems that do that now but the stories are poor.
Reverse engineering best sellers to expert systems is surely going to happen.
by GatorALLin
…so could Amazon give out FREE Kindles if you buy 50 books, or some way to create a win/win if they know books going digital helps sell even more for them? Can we say there is a Mores Law like curve for electronic book sales like this…. or is it growing even faster like some logarithmic curve to increase at an increasing rate?
by Gorden Russell
Good idea, GatorALLin, there’s got to be a logarithmic progression in there some where.
by Mindsight
A while back, Kevin Kelly asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about the trending-towards-free pricing of the Kindle. Bezos smiled, and his reply was a cryptic, “Oh, you noticed that?”
In addition to books, the Kindle can deliver games, music and movies, and each generation of devices ups the “consumability” of the media Amazon sells. There’s probably a tipping point coming up for them, where on average their profits on the media sold far surpass the cost of the device itself. (Perhaps they’ve already passed that point.)
From the standpoint of shareholder value and overall company profits, I wouldn’t start giving away the Kindle, though, until a competitor started offering their own devices for free. Apple doesn’t seem inclined to do this, and I don’t see Barnes & Noble going that route anytime soon, either.
A bit out of left field, perhaps, but I can imagine Disney or Scholastic or Addison-Wesley, or some other child/family/educational media giant beating Amazon, et al., to the punch, here: giving away a basic, rugged (i.e., flexible-screen) reader/player, tied exclusively to their own content, to families or schools. Or maybe as part of a cable TV/Internet subscription package.