eBooks outpace print books on Amazon

(Updated 10:33 p.m.) New technologies are turning a page in publishing history with eBooks now flying off (virtual) shelves faster than print books in terms of sales, so reported the online commerce site Amazon.com on Thursday (Friday in Manila). Amazon said that for every 100 print books it sells, a total of 105 eBooks get delivered to users of its eBook-reading device, the Kindle. “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years," said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon. In April, the company said it sold three times as much Kindle books than it had in the same period last year. The popular e-reader tore off a page from hand-held camera history back in December 2003 when digital cameras first outsold film cameras in the US, as the International Data Corporation (IDC) had noted. IDC correctly predicted that digital cameras sales worldwide would soon outpace film camera sales by 2004. This tremendous growth in Kindle book sales, Amazon said has resulted in “the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon’s US books business, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years." The company said Kindle books have surpassed hardcover book sales in July 2010, while paperback books followed six months after. Amazon credits this sudden growth to its recently introduced $114 Kindle with Special Offers edition – which quickly became the fastest-selling edition in the Kindle family. “We continue to receive positive comments from customers on the low $114 price and the money-saving special offers," Bezos said. As of posting time, Amazon’s Kindle Store has more than 950,000 books up for sale, majority of which are sold for under $10. It also has a vast collection of free, out-of-copyright (“public domain"), pre-1923 books which can all be downloaded onto Kindle. All Kindle Books lets the user “Buy Once, Read Everywhere" on any and all generations of Kindles, as well as on a number of devices and platforms, including Apple devices such as the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone and Mac, Microsoft Windows powered PCs and Windows Phone, and Android-based devices such as Research in Motion (RIM) Playbooks. — MRT/VS, GMA News