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

Re:Same phenomenon as the mobile app market

[commodore64_love]

>>>Kindle: 8.09, Paperback: 8.49, Used: 3.68

And if you turn-around and sell the Used book to somebody else for ~$3.00, then you've really only paid 68 cents. That's why I prefer the real thing - it has resell value when I'm done with it.

Re:the ebook ripoff

[ErikZ]

Welcome to capitalism.

Buy things you think are worth the price, don't buy things you don't. The market will respond.

As for me, I agree with you 100% and I've been a Kindle owner for years now. This has lead me down the path of trying new Authors who are trying to build a name for themselves. They do it by offering lower priced books, or even giving away the first book in a series.

It's been great!

E-Calibre?

[willynate]

I'm just curious why no one has mentioned e-calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) as a great tool for essentially removing the DRM from Amazon books. Just suck your .amz or .mobi books off your Kindle and convert them to .epub and back. A buddy and me have permenantly "loaned" each other copies of several books we bought off Amazon in this manner.