Bezos ‘astonished’ by Kindle success
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
"today, for titles that have a Kindle edition, Kindle book sales are 48 percent of the physical sales."
That sounds really great: however, how much percent of the books have a Kindle edition ?
In addition to that, more importantly, this is only within the Amazon audience: I bet a lot more Amazon customers fall into the eBook audience than the average audience of bookstores. But by stories like these, a lot of people will be made aware of the success of the eBooks, and will be afraid of missing out on something.
However, over here in The Netherlands, some numbers were released today: 60,000 eBook sales in 2009. Compare that to the total of 50,000,000 books sold, and you can see eBooks still account for about 0.1% of the total book sales. Hardly comparable to the "48%" named in the article.
http://nos.nl/artikel/125693-60000-ebooks-verkocht-in-nederl...
And the translated version:
I have heard this question asked rhetorically approximately 15 times and nobody ever seems to be willing to get their hands dirty.
The New York Times bestseller lists both identify and anoint winners in the publishing markets, which are winners-take-most games where the head vastly outsells the tail. You can read them online. You can also search for books on Amazon. Combining these two processes in a revolutionary way produces the following:
Fiction:
The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown): KINDLE
I, ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson: KINDLE
UNDER THE DOME, by Stephen King -- no kindle
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett: KINDLE
U IS FOR UNDERTOW, by Sue Grafton: KINDLE
PIRATE LATITUDES, by Michael Crichton: KINDLE
FORD COUNTY, by John Grisham -- no kindle
THE LAST SONG, by Nicholas Sparks -- KINDLE
THE CHRISTMAS SWEATER, by Glenn Beck et al -- no kindle
THE LACUNA, by Barbara Kingsolver -- no kindle
Feel free to do the gruntwork for non-fiction. I think you will find pretty much the same,