Tipping Point: Kindle Books Outsell Hardcovers

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Permalink Reply by Brian on July 20, 2010 at 4:39am

It's worth pointing out the reporting on this is a bit misleading. I think many people will take it to mean that kindle e-books are outselling actual books (i.e. trades, paperbacks, etc) - not just hardcovers which have always been more the realm of technical books and first printings of novels, etc.

Which if applied to novels, actually makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally - one can reason that people who read fiction books more would be more likely to be kindle adopters and therefore substitute the new releases of novels in ebook rather than hardcover. The cost (per-book) savings as well as ease of access is more important to them.

For more casual readers (your typical mass market paperback audience), the kindle doesn't really make sense in terms of pricepoint. If they'd release more complete numbers one could get a better understanding of what's actually happening. As it is they're merely driving up hype for kindle.

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Permalink Reply by Roger Garrett on July 20, 2010 at 6:48pm

I'm not sure how much meaning there is in that statement. Surely, hardcover sales account for a very, very low percentage of Amazon's overall sales. Only a small percentage of new books are published in hardcover versions and even those often come out in softcover a few months later.

I'd think that the more important number would be the percentage of books sold as Kindle downloads as compared to overall printed book sales. And that is what would determine whether or not "the publishing business is going digital at a furious rate."

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Permalink Reply by Brian on July 20, 2010 at 8:26pm

Indeed Roger, but that wouldn't make the point that Amazon is trying to promote (the Kindle rules!!111, publish for it! buy one!)

In certain markets outside the US, hardcovers are even more rare - Australia for example they're very uncommon.

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