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Tuesday 26 July 2011

Kindling has taken - Kindle books selling faster than print books

The sale of Kindle books has overtaken the sale of old school print books according to Amazon.com. Amazon.com started selling books, softcover and hardcover, in July 1995. Kindle was introduced in November 2007.

It toook just three years to out sell hardcover books and a further six months more to overtake softcover books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today less than four years after the launch of the Kindle, Amazon.com customers are buying more Kindle books than all print books combined.

Since April 1, 2011 for every 100 print books Amazon.com sold it sold 105 Kindle books. This is excluding the free books that Kindle offers. Amazon.com has sold more than three times as many Kindle's so far in 2011 than it did in 2010.

Kindle books let you "Buy once, read everywhere" on all generation Kindles as well as on other platforms like Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, MAC, PC, Windows Phone, Android-based systems and many others.

However it will be interesting to see how the sale of Kindle books will be affected by an Apple issued edict that all Apps offering content for sale or subscription are required to do so through the App Store and not through external links to the sellers web store. In addition to this Apple also want 30% of sales through an iOS app!

The Kindle seems to be an amazing product and more importantly it means that people are still interested in reading books. Although the medium through which we read books is shifting from paper to digital it is still great to see that the Kindle is getting people reading more. Maybe not more people reading but at least people are reading.


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