eBooks Nearly Outsell Print Books At Amazon

destinyland writes "Thursday Amazon.com announced that they're selling more ebooks than paperback books — and three times as many ebooks as hardcovers. If you combine their statistics into a pie chart, it shows that 45% of all the books Amazon sells are now ebooks. And Amazon's statistic doesn't include all the free ebooks people are downloading to their Kindles, so if just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions." Another reader tips an interview with Brian Altounian, CEO of ebook marketplace WOWIO, in which he discusses an encroaching feature that ebook aficionados love to hate: ads.

Comments

I will accept ads

[denshao2]

if the books are free.

Re:I will accept ads

[Obyron]

And I'll never buy another eBook the first time I see an ad in one. We balance out. Books are about immersion, and having ads will ruin it for me.

Re:I will accept ads

[macshit]

And I'll never buy another eBook the first time I see an ad in one. We balance out. Books are about immersion, and having ads will ruin it for me.

It seems like it depends critically on the presentation and content of the ads.

Many (physical) paperbacks I buy have little fall-out inserts advertising other releases by the same publisher, book clubs, etc. I don't mind these -- I glance them, sometimes read them, usually toss them out (though the mini-catalogues of other books are actually useful enough to keep in some cases). They're easily ignored, not in my face, often informative, and topical.

Ebook adverts with these same properties wouldn't be too objectionable I think.

OTOH, I imagine the likelihood of ebook publishers not screwing it up is very low -- there's this weird idea amongst publishing entities (not just books but movies, music, etc) that any change of medium means that all the rules change, that any and all conventions and lessons learned from the old medium should be tossed out, and that the new medium is carte blanche to viciously ream the consumer while bleeding him dry.

One would hope that consumers (and regulators, where appropriate) would disabuse publishers of this notion...

Keep in mind

[c0d3g33k]

That Amazon does not represent the entire book market - they sell to a subset of customers that don't mind getting their books online. The fact that a significant portion of those customers are equally happy with ebooks isn't exactly a revelation. There are still a lot of people out there who prefer to buy real books, whether or not the big bookstores are catering to them.

Re:Keep in mind

[geekoid]

um, Amazon caters to all story lovers, whether it's print or electronic. It sells a huge base of books in a wide swath if genres.

Like it or not, it's a strong market indicator

Yes, there will always be book lovers. People who think the value in reading is the number books on their shelves.

I pity them.

Re:Kindle owner

[rudy_wayne]

As long as the Kindle has the ability to remotely delete books, they can go fuck themself.

Re:This is a tragedy.

[icebike]

Every single thing you said is false in the digital world.

Its not a common place for people to learn. Library patronage is falling fast.

Its no longer needed for a literate society. We have thousands of book stores, the Internet, and millions of totally free ebooks.

Finding new authors? ---> Google.

Enhances sales? Suppresses sales you mean.

And libraries deprive authors of thousands of royalties.

So wrong on 100% of your points. A case can be made that libraries in the digital age serve precisely one purpose, and that is to assure continued availability of works unpopular with the State or the Church or the general times.

Its an unpopular view, but never the less, libraries have largely outlived their general usefulness.