Kindle books have overtaken paperbacks as the most popular format on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Kindle books have overtaken paperbacks as the most popular format on Amazon

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35 pointsjonknee39 comments

Paper books are going the way of film - though it's about three or four years ahead of the curve that I predicted when I got my first Kindle.

People still use film to take pictures, and people will continue to buy paper books - but as the format improves, the resolution and page changing gets better, and the battery life increases, "Paper Books" will become more an more niche - I think people are going to be absolutely shocked how quickly tablets wipe out the paper textbook market.

I originally predicted (in 2007, when I got my first kindle - a laughable device compared to my K3 (or Ipad+Kindle, for that matter) - that eBooks would overtake Paper books as the most popular format in 2015 - eight years seemed like a reasonable time span based on previous transitions (Vinyl->CD, VHS->DVD). Then three years to pick up the late majority, and finally another three years to reduce paper books to a tiny niche - 2021 would have us all reading books on electrical devices. Given that 2012 looks like it will be the year eBooks become more popular (Give it a full two years after they become the most popular on Amazon), It looks like that prediction was off - pull everything in by about three years. 2018 - The year people will look at you funny if you are reading a paper book.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens to all of our libraries...

The problem though is that paper books still cost less money than their Kindle counterparts.

Wow, this is great news for my weekend startup, Booklends. I think that the 'try before you buy' model will work great for eBooks. So I'm creating a website http://www.booklends.com to let Kindle users borrow and lend books with other users.

Certain books (depending on if the publisher allows it) can be loaned from one user to another for up to 14 days. Booklends will let you keep track of all your books and let you make wishlists of books that you want to borrow from other people.

My site is coming together quickly, now I just have to get it finished and launched! :)

Hopefully this isn't a surprise, but there's one out there: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/

Though I do like your name better.

Haha, yeah it's not a surprise.. I didn't know they were creating their own site - I thought they wanted to just keep it as Facebook group. But by the time they launched, I was well into it, so I decided that I may as well finish what I started.

> so I decided that I may as well finish what I started.

I like the spirit. I'll keep an eye on booklends. Hopefully it will be fewer romance novels and more good books.

Thanks! I'm going to try to just support all the books that are lendable.

But to your point - I've found that there is a surprising amount of romance/erotica novels on Amazon Kindle. I have my crawlers doing common searches, and it turns out that a large number (more than I'd expect anyway) of the books on there are of the shirtless-dude-on-the-cover type.

With a Kindle, nobody else on the bus knows what you're reading...

If you can make your site intelligent enough to stop sending me "you have a lending request" emails for books that I've already lent, I'll switch! ;)

Catherine here from KindleLendingClub.com - You've put your finger on one of the pain points for our users :) A challenge of developing a community platform around Kindle lending is that there is no straightforward way for us to hook into Amazon's Kindle lending system to determine whether a loan did or did not actually occur. We're trying to work around this by asking lenders to "confirm" the loan at the time they do it, but it's a necessarily imperfect workaround that we're refining in our next iteration. If for some reason a lender doesn't click to confirm the loan, the lender's book loan offer remains live and triggers reminders when there are other borrowers for the title.

To stop lending request reminders for a particular title, you can delete the loan offer from your profile: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/myprofile.htm

If you need help or have feedback, we're just an email away: info@kindlelendingclub.com

theres also http://lendle.me

How big a portion of the total number of books sold world wide goes through Amazon?

That's an important number in this debate, you could easily interpret this as 'ebooks are now sold more frequently than paperbacks' but I'm not seeing bookstores going out of business in the towns that I visit so there must be more to it.

Another question that needs answering is how many of these ebooks would have been sold as paperbacks, and how many of them are really sold just on the merit of being available as an ebook.

Typically I'll read anything technical on a screen and 'books' in dead tree format, and I pass my copy on to someone else after I'm done with it. As long as ebooks do not allow me to do that given the price I'd much rather have a 'real' book than a stream of bits, it seems more value for money.

> That's an important number in this debate, you could easily interpret this as 'ebooks are now sold more frequently than paperbacks' but I'm not seeing bookstores going out of business in the towns that I visit so there must be more to it.

In the US, bookstores are going out of business at a rapid pace. Borders is nearly insolvent, Barnes & Noble is on a long slump (the only thing that may save them is eBooks). Independent bookstores have been declining for at least a decade if not two.

Stores can be fairly resilient in the face of terrible trading conditions for some years, especially the big chains. So there is some lag time between a business model becoming unworkable and the companies pursuing it disappearing.

Plus, bookstores are a relatively slow business in the first place. Even a healthy bookstore doesn't sell anywhere near as many books in a day as, say, McDonalds does hamburgers.

They are used to and designed to handle slow sales, so it's taking a long time for this to kill them.

I'm not saying I disagree, but I don't think it's a fair argument to compare a non-essential "luxury" item (books) to food, a necessity (especially when the former costs $10+ and the latter is roughly $1 each).

"As long as ebooks do not allow me to do that given the price I'd much rather have a 'real' book than a stream of bits, it seems more value for money."

Disclaimer: I got a kindle recently, so I haven't tried this yet, but..

Amazon says you can give a kindle ebook to anyone with an email address. Just create an email address for every book you buy, and you should be able to give/lend/sell it to anybody without limitation.

If somebody tries this let me know how it goes. I'm sure I will sometime in the next week or two. I just got my kindle, and I haven't wanted a book since Christmas.

That's really neat, I didn't know about that.

So the 'doctrine of first sale' applies to ebooks!

Wonder if that extends to app store apps and to songs bought via itunes or Amazon.

Hmm, one drawback is that you'd have to switch accounts on your kindle for every book.

Is it just me, or has this been an extremely swift market transition from physical towards digital? Even counting that it is only Amazon we're talking about?

The transition from film to digital cameras was very quick once it happened, but my feeling is that ebooks were adopted sooner after mass-market devices became available. Anyone got numbers?

Would be interesting to compare with Netflix's transition from DVD to streaming as well!

I've thought about this too. Amazon sold millions of Kindles this past holiday shopping season.. Why? I personally know 6 people who got Kindles or Nooks in the last month.

It would be interesting to know what contributed to their 'overnight' success. Perhaps there's something magic about the $139 price point, which I suspect is about what a serious reader might spend on paper books every year anyway (Nobody has better data on this than Amazon)..

Also there weren't really any other big ticket, must have items this holiday season - no game consoles launching.

Like I said, it would be really interesting to know why this transition happened so suddenly, and why now..

The $139 price point makes them a good gift, about the amount you may be looking to spend on someone close to you. I got mine because my girlfriend was asking what I wanted for Christmas and it's about that price point where if you decided later you didn't like it it's not a huge deal.

Interestingly in the space of half a book I've pretty much decided the vast majority of my future purchases will be ebooks despite being someone who initially questioned whether books would easily transition to digital.

Yep, the $139 price point did it for me. I bought myself one for Thanksgiving ;)

I've bought like 15 ebooks since then, and now if it's not available for Kindle, I just won't buy a book.

One thing that helps books transition is that people who actually _buy books_ are probably educated, wealthier, and technically savvy.

There are multiple people I know who I don't think have ever bought a book in their adult life. The fact that the market to entice is smaller, makes it an easier market to become bigger than.

I'm wondering how many of those are free - a lot of classics are free on kindle.

For instance: Robinson Crusoe http://www.amazon.com/Life-Adventures-Robinson-Crusoe-ebook/...

The article says that free books are not included in this count of sales.

Notice many aren't free if you live outside the US and a few other locations; you'll get charged the $2 "international whispernet delivery fee" or whatever they call it.

And even then, they might not even be available (like the one you referenced).

If you want classics, much better to just hit http://manybooks.net or the gutenberg project site and get them directly in kindle format through your desktop/laptop and copy them over USB.

Just to clarify for any others who misread the title, this is comparing paperbacks to Kindle edition, not all paper books. The numbers imply Kindle sales are about 85% of hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Also, since Amazon sells 100% of the Kindle books its readers buy, but only some of the physical books its readers buy, I think this most interesting part of this release is what it says about how great a business move the Kindle was for Amazon. Every time a customer switches to the Kindle they instantly gain a lot of sales that used to happen at various physical bookstores. And that's before even considering that people who walk around with a bookstore 1 foot from them will buy more books, too.

I think you may be mistaken

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.

100 paperbacks ~= 115 kindle books ~= 40 hardcover books (33% of 115)

140 paper books ~= 115 kindle books => ~82% as many kindle books as paper books

Oops.

Thank's for the explanation :) Perhaps Amazon's words are intentionally ambiguous.

EDIT: Actually, I just read TechCrunch's article

Has the pixel to print tipping point been reached? Last July we reported that Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Now that lead also holds for paperbacks and by default all books, with 115 Kindle books being sold for every hundred paperbacks.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/27/kindle-books-overtake-paper...

I don't really see the death of print as something imminent, but the convenience of e-books might make them more preferable to a lot of people.

My actual question is if the decline in brick and mortar book shops will just fuel a print-on-demand industry instead?

Granted, the price for production and shipping can only be so low - MagCloud is completely non-viable for someone living in my part of Europe due to shipping rates.

There is a tactic that Amazon has been doing that frustrates me and might contribute to why kindle books are selling so well.

Search for a book, if there is a kindle edition, it will be the one that shows up on the search NOT the paperback. You have to navigate around just to get to the paperback.

It doesn't do that for me, but it's not that far off since the kindle version is the best selling version. They may also boost Kindle results if you have purchased a Kindle before (that would actually be pretty clever).

Hopefully the older publishers will change the way that they deal with digital books now that the medium is becoming (has become?) mainstream. I know many publishers will offer lump sums to authors to publish digitally, but wont give any royalties (despite the often equivalent pricing).

Wow. It seems like yesterday that eBooks were just becoming somewhat well known...thanks to Bezos and Jobs for nailing this major accomplishment in such a short amount of time!

What did Jobs do? The Kindle was massively popular before the iPad was conceived. In fact, Jobs derided Amazon for releasing the Kindle.

The iPad brought eBooks to ~8 million people within the past year. I may not be an Apple fanboy (I'm a PC), but the iPad is making eBooks much more common. To be clear, I'm not talking about iBooks, I'm talking about the iPad as a reading device.

Kindle sales surely would've increased with or without the existence of an iPad, but I'm inclined to believe they absolutely increased faster with.

Personally, I sold my Kindle after a few months because I wasn't getting enough utility out of it; after getting an iPad, I've started buying Kindle books again.

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