Slashdot Mirror
Ebooks Now Outselling Print Books At Amazon
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNN:
"As further proof of how digital media dominate today's entertainment, Amazon announced Thursday that its customers now buy more e-books for its Kindle device than all print books — hardcover and paperback — combined. Given that people seem to spend more and more of their time peering at glowing electronic screens, this was probably bound to happen. Still, the swiftness of this sea change — three-and-a-half years after the Kindle hit the market — appeared to catch even Amazon by surprise. 'Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,' said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in a statement."
Consumers wanting to read books electronically can now choose from many competing devices, including Sony's Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and a variety of touchscreen tablets, including Apple's iPad.
They make it sound so easy and effortless! But they fail to address the matrix of which service and format is support/authorized for which device. You can blame it on DRM or competitor lockout greed or whatever but it's still a major inhibitor in my mind.
My work here is dung.
From the Amazon press release:
"Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher."