Well, in case you've been living under a rock, it appears Amazon Kindle e-books are now outselling their hardcover books. It probably helped that Amazon lowered the price of their Kindle from $259.00 to $189.00 and that they offer a free Kindle app for Ipad, Iphones and a half dozen other devices.
According to Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. ". . .even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books--astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months."
In addition, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books. Five authors--Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts--have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books. Amazing.
Is this a temporary upswing due to all the new e-reading devices now coming on the market, including the Apple Ipad and Iphone? Will we see a gradual plateauing and then a dip back to more hardcover sales?
I'm excited to hear Amazon's e-books are doing so well. I love technology. On the other hand, I love a good book, physically in hand. Lounging with it, cracking it's spine, bending a corner of the page when I don't have a bookmark handy. I've had a long, satisfying and loving relationship with books and I don't ever want to walk away from them for the spell-binding allure of 3-G and blazing tech.
Although, maybe once in awhile. Every now and again, if I ever get a Kindle. . .
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