E-book Sales Outpace Hard Cover Purchases at Amazon

By Paula Bernier

Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines

 

E-books are outselling hard covers 143 to 100, according to sales data released by Amazon for the past three months.

That probably shouldn't come as a surprise, given most Amazon e-book selections are priced at just under $10 (vs. $25 or more for a hard cover), and are a whole lot easier on your back as well as on your pocketbook. Amazon reportedly has more than 630,000 Kindle titles that sell for less than $10.

Of course, e-books also offer the added convenience factor of enabling readers to order books wherever they are and whenever they're inspired by the book suggestion of a friend or commentator. And if a reader finishes one book by an author and wants to immediately move on to another by the same writer or on a related topic, the ability to order the next selection while the reader is still wanting more seems to have great potential for driving additional sales.

And while Amazon didn't say anything about where e-book sales are relative to the less-expensive and more lightweight paperback book, the growth of the e-book and related digital publications is only expected to grow in light of the growing acceptance of consumer electronics devices and online use; the rise of the Apple iPad; and the greater accessibility of e-book platforms due to more and lower cost devices in this category coming to market.

As TMCnet recently reported, a new price war for low-end e-readers could force Barnes & Noble and Amazon to rely more heavily on their profit from selling e-books, accelerate the shift of book sales to digital delivery, cut the profit out of the device market and, as is typical when prices are cut, expand the e-book market overall. The changes are the sort of unintended developments that cause adoption curves to deviate from linear growth projections.

Barnes & Noble cut the price of its Nook e-reader to $199 while Amazon.com (News - Alert) immediately responded by slashing the price of its standard Kindle e-reader to $189. Both models had been $259.