Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books last quarter | Hacker News Reader

Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books last quarter

nytimes.com

40 pointshexis34 comments

Before you dismiss this because it's limited to hardcover books, keep in mind that, for general books, a hardcover version is often released before a paperback one is made available. This means that many new hot books will only be available as hardcover or Kindle editions. And the Kindle format is winning.

This is a remarkable result and should be considered as a sign that we are reaching a tipping point for ebooks, to phrase it in a Gladwell-esque way.

I don't think we're at a tipping point yet. Amazon sold Kindles to its most regular book customers. We'll reach a tipping point when the general public begins to purchase ebooks, but I don't think we're there yet.

We don't know how many of these purchases are to Amazon's best customers. I would be very curious to see the purchases broken down by the number of customers purchasing ebooks vs those purchasing paper books. And by quantity, how many ebooks are purchased vs paper books per customer. Is this simply a fact of frequent customers now buying ebooks, or many more customers now buying ebooks.

The statistics might be rather different if the Kindle edition wasn't 1/3 the price of a hardcover.

Making the Kindle app available on a multitude of devices (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc.) was a very smart move by Amazon. If someone has a kindle now, it is absolutely no problem for them to get an iPad or other device and continue reading/purchasing books.

Yep, you can read it anywhere Amazon allows you to read it.

"Disallows" and "hasn't finished writing software for yet" are two different beasts. Amazon wants you to be able to read your books wherever you want; the more places you can read them, and the happier you are, the more ebooks they sell.

I suspect RexRollman's point was about DRM. If Amazon doesn't support your platform, then it isn't supported. You can't even write your own software to read Kindle books because of the DRM.

How about on a Sony eReader touch? You're saying they have plans for that as well?

No more than they could possibly be having plans for the iTouch (and by extension iPhone), which is billed as the answer to the Kindle.

Well, that's not true really. There's not a snowball's chance in hell Sony would ever LET them distribute a reader app, no matter how much Amazon wanted to.

Amazon doesn't need to distribute an app for the Sony reader touch. Just the books themselves in epub format instead of their current kindle/mobipocket format.

I keep looking to make a kindle purchase of a newer book. The price floor of $10 on a digital item has so far been hard to swallow. I've downloaded plenty of out of copyright classics, but why buy the kindle edition for $10 when I can get a gently used paperback for around $6 shipped with the ability to resell it for anywhere between $4-$8 depending on supply?

Reselling paperbacks and getting a good price for them? What's your time worth?

It isn't just my time. It's about making sure books get read. I can't throw a book out so I figure I'll ship it off to someone else.

A box of padded envelopes and the post office is 100ft from where I eat lunch nearly every day. It isn't so much of a hassle.

Not only that, but the kindle actually slows down my reading. Overall a paperbook is less of a time commitment.

The $10 price is pushing it just a little bit, but I buy enough books of other varieties- older books and public domain books, typically $7 and $1-2 respectively- that I figure it works out ok in the end.

This is just for hardcovers - not paperbacks. Outside of textbooks, we have very few hardcovers in our house.

Also, keeping in mind that online book sales account for only 15.5% of all books sold (at least in Germany), it's not the end of the printed book by a longshot.

Germany's online booksellers have ridiculous prices. I don't know what the marketshare figures look like in the rest of the world, but I would be very surprised if they were comparable to Germany.

Good point. My mind skimmed the hardcover element completely. Do you pay more for postage when purchasing a hardcover book?

Amazon offers free 2-day shipping after $25 in purchases for most of their items. For the price of a hardcover book you might already qualify for free shipping, or just add another item to get to $25 and get free shipping.

I have a problem with the term "Sold" when it comes to Kindle books. Nobody actually "buys" one, they license it.

DRM is toxic.

The Kindle DRM is pretty easy to strip off. Then you have a mobipocket ebook that can be easily converted to epub, pdf, etc.

You not really advising me to break the law, are you?

I didn't advise you to do anything. I'm just stating a simple fact.

Deleted comment

FTA:

"The Kindle sales figure does not include free Kindle books, of which there are 1.8 million originally published before 1923 available for downloading."

It does not include free books. No mention of "almost free".

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34551590/AmazonRelease6-19-2010

Wow thats impressive then... I was almost sure it would include those.

I think the books that are free in the US are just almost free in Europe, via whispernet at least.

This means Apple, out of nowhere, could soon become the #1 or #2 book retailer in the world by next year. Apple has sold 3M iPads, roughly the same as the Kindle - http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/201...

There will probably be around 2:1 iPads to Kindles and Nooks by the end of the year. They are doing what they did with music with books.

But also remember that many people don't own kindles, but buy books & use the software on other devices -- quite often Apple devices.

For now anyways. I doubt many people with iPads will buy Kindles in the future and Apple's eReader will scale far beyond the kindle because it offers so much more. It will be interesting to see what happens when the Android tablets roll out.

did you actually comprehend what lallysingh was saying?

I'll summarize - many people who are buying kindle books are not using amazon hardware.

A year from now there will be 2-3 times as many iPads in circulation as there are Kindles. 2 years, way more. Most of these people obviously will not have prior Kindle accounts and they will buy via iBooks rather than a third party app. The size of the pie is increasing, Kindle's slice can't keep pace.

I have my doubts on people preferring iBooks. Amazon.com is a much better place to shop, and as long as I have any other type of machine, the kindle books are more flexible for me.

And yet for all the books I wanted to buy last week paperbacks were cheaper compared to Kindle books. So much for digital copies being easier to manufacture and all that.

I only see myself buying Kindle books for something unavailable in paper form or with a serious discount.

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