Amazon selling more digital books

Online shopping giant Amazon has recently announced that it is now selling more digital books for the Kindle e-reader than the equivalent hardback ones. Previously, the company had never shared with the public how many Kindle devices or e-books it had sold to customers.

Since the price has been lowered, the growth rate of the e-book readers’ sales has tripled. Although this announcement has been made that substantially more e-books are being sold, figures of exactly how many have been purchased is still unknown.

During the past three months, Amazon says it has sold 143 Kindle e-books for every 100 hardback books. Within the past month (following the price drop of the Kindle device) this number has increased to 180 e-books for every 100 hardback books sold. These figures do not include paperback books, which are likely to still have a greater sales volume than both hardback and e-books by a wide gap.

For 15 years Amazon has been selling hardback books; the Kindle e-book device on the other hand has not even been around for three years. Remarkably there are five individual authors who have each sold over 500,000 e-books through the website, including Charlaine Harris, Steig Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson and Nora Roberts.