Amazon Sells More E-Books Than Hardcover Copies

The introduction of Apple's iPad appears to have had little effect on Amazon.com's sales of Kindle e-readers. In fact, Kindle sales grew each month in the second quarter as Amazon lowered the price. And Amazon reports customers are buying more e-books than hardcovers. An analyst predicted the decline of brick-and-mortar bookstores

The Kindle is dead. Long live the Kindle. That seems to be the current flavor of the iPad versus Kindle e-book battle.

As Apple prepared to launch the iPad, complete with an e-bookstore, some pundits questioned whether it would cripple the market-leading Kindle. Amazon.com's latest numbers offer a clear answer. Amazon announced that Kindle sales grew each month in the second quarter -- both on a sequential month-over-month basis and year over year.

"We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle -- the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books -- astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."

Source: News Factor

Proof in Numbers

The U.S. Kindle Store has a much broader selection than Apple's effort, with more than 630,000 books. The catalog includes new releases and 106 of 110 New York Times best sellers. More than 510,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 75 best sellers. More than 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

Over the past three months, Amazon reports selling 143 Kindle e-books for every 100 hardcovers. And over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle e-books. This is across Amazon's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. And that's not counting free Kindle books, either. Amazon said if it included the freebies, that number would rank even higher.

Amazon's e-book news is significant, said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. "Amazon does tend to get early adopters. The typical customer there is one that is more likely to buy e-books and e-book readers than the general population," he said. "This is an irrevocable trend, and probably within five years, there will only be about half as many Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores."

No Conclusive Evidence?

Here's another statistic: Amazon sold more than three times as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009. The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

On July 6, Hachette announced that author James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books. Five authors -- Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts -- have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

"The Wall Street journal interviewed a couple of publishers. One publisher said there's no conclusive evidence that e-book sales are cannibalizing printed book sales," Leigh said. "It reminds me of what the tobacco industry said 30 years ago. They said there's no conclusive evidence that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer or emphysema."