Slashdot Mirror
Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales In UK
twoheadedboy writes "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks."
Now an ebook.
So does the kindle support ePub yet ...?
(or non-latin scripts?)
We live, as we dream -- alone....
This is not because eBooks are taking off. It's because they are great for consuming inane trash like Fifty Shades which have no literary value or retention reason.
The majority of the people in the UK are illiterate and the rest of us would rather buy second hand books than fish out for the cash for a new copy.
I bet they conveniently ignore the second hand market on Amazon as well.
Another vindication for technological progress, and another steely blow to the right of first sale.
are just chicks buying lady-porn i.e. romance novels
Every kindle owner has dozens of free ebooks of classics downloaded from Amazon. On my own kindle right now, I have 41 free ebooks (downloaded form amazon like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wuthering-Heights-ebook/dp/B004UJAOLM/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1344332042&sr=1-10) and 4 bona fide paid-for ebooks.
Stats inflation much?
I don't think so, you could however use calibre to convert it and then get a friend to read the long words for you
I am quite thankful for e-readers as they have allowed me to read more books in a more convenient format by solving problems I was experiencing with paper books, namely: storage (I own too many books and carry too many books while traveling) and font size (I have an eagle nose, not eagle eyes).
For all the problems (DRM, bad typesetting) and the perception of (IMO hyperbolic) problems with e-books (oh, Amazon will know which page I am reading -- as if there was not a direct way to turn that off AND as if you couldn't just always have your Kindle with Wifi/Radio turned off), e-books are winning. Much in the same way that digital music won. There are just too many advantages.
The Kindle (or any other e-reader I've seen) can still use loads of improvements in typesetting quality, but just the fact that I can adjust font size and type are real deal breakers for me. Instant dictionary look-up is a God send for those reading in foreign languages, but it can also be improved, dictionary setting should also work per-book, so that I don't need to switch back and forth between language dictionaries all the time. It would also be nice if a new Kindle also did PDF reflow, but I doubt it, Amazon is likely to continue giving it its half-baked support that is just good enough to avoid users from going elsewhere.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html
Do these include sales using fictional credit card numbers added for account takeover purposes?
Sure, more e-books are bought, but how many of those are read? Perhaps people are just buying e-books because they are easy to buy, and never get around to reading their purchases.
There's something really sad about this. I hope they keep making books, and while I know deep down that they probably will, this scares me.
having a Kindle touch, Kindle Fire, and even an iPad 2, I find myself reading almost all new books on the Kindle Touch. For two reasons, its so damn light and second because I can use it in full sun light.
For me nothing beats being able to read outside without having to worry about glare and portability. While I am still a fan of hard cover books, having shelves of them, I am more than happy to own an e-reader version of them. Too bad publishers don't help the trend and follow a similar model DVD publishers do, where you can get a digital version without your hard copy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Was about to buy a kindle book on Amazon when I realised that the kindle version was more expensive than the paper version! And it was not only for this particular book, but almost all the book are more expensive in Kindle version. This is insane! At least with a real book, I can give it to one of my friend and share it indefinitively. When they will come to more reasonable term I may resume to buy eBook but for the time being I'm not going to be their milk cow :)
Bullshit. The actual story is Kindle E-Book Sales Surpass Print Sales ON AMAZON In UK.
Huge difference.
My wife has hundreds of classics which she downloaded but has not read. I have downloaded some things on a "free for today" offer, read a page and then just discarded them. I wonder if these are included in the ebook sales. TFA doesn't not say.
Yes I've bought some books - mainly when they are "deal of the day" fodder or in the 99p or less price bracket. The rest are the "free" selection; classics or trashy sci-fi, thrillers and crime novels. My position on kindle books is only to buy when they are interesting and at charity shop levels.
On the other hand, I've bought a number of hard-back novels from Amazon in the same time period, because they're cheaper and more readily available than from local bookshops, either independent or a chain. Each time, the Kindle price for the book has been a pound or less lower than the hardback price with delivery.
£7 or more for a kindle book is a great disincentive to buy.
The tech ignorant masses still don't understand the freedoms they are giving up with ebooks. This is a serious problem. Also it is the beginning of a dark period for future archaeologists.
Hi, I'm Johannes Gutenberg and my movable-type printing press business is suffering now that more people are buying these "e-books" instead of books printed using my presses. It's also killing the book binding business with many fine artisans looking for work.
Please stop purchasing these ebooks and go back to reading books printed with ink on paper. And please help out in the buggy-whip industry as well.
You buy two books from Amazon, one physical and the other for the Kindle. After you finish reading them, you want to pass it around your family and friends. To share the physical copy, you just ... hand it to someone. To share the Kindle copy, you must give Amazon that person's email address. They are then allowed to read it for two weeks. And you can only share it once.
Given the fact that Kindle books often cost the same or more than physical books, these restrictions make the Kindle versions a very bad deal for the consumer. Worse, in my opinion, than DRM on music, because you have to give up the email address of the person you are sharing your purchase with. Name me one other merchant who requires that you personally identify the person you share a purchase with. I'm not sure that's even legal, but even if it is, it's a horrible precedent.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Kindle readers buy four times the number of books they did before owning one, according to other data. :)
This is the actual thing that is good about the device... I even count the up/reading time of my kindle with uptimeproject
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
When a book only cost $/€/£0.01 I'm buying a few from one second hand seller on Amazon.
Is that accounted for?
General Personal Stat: For every 1 Kindle book I've purchased I've bought 5 - 8 second hand books through the same site.
Otherwise you could claim any device supports any format so long as you convert it first!
"OK, the science. What we buy is a copy. We can't sell that copy without selling the physical device that it's on. Really, we can't. To get it on someone else's device, we'd have to make another copy. "
You think its that simple? You might want to go read the smallprint in amazons agreement.
Oh , and good luck being able to read anything when your expensive toy inevitably breaks.
If someone today invented a device that was always on, could always be accessed , was available to anyone at any time and didn't require recharging it would be hailed as a miracle. Except its already around and is called a book and yet people laugh. Talk about being suckered by Oooh-shiny! tech.
eBooks should be a CONVENIENCE format AS WELL as your paper copy.
It should NOT be REPLACING your paper copy.
Anybody who buys an ebook without a paper copy is just a mug and is welcome to jump blindly off the cliff to the CLOUD.
My parents came in with this leaflet about FREE CLOUD from the purchase of a new computer and asked me to install it lol.
FOOLS.
You can pry my paper books from my dead cold hands.
Can you back up the ebooks? This is *absolutely crucial*. A year or so ago, Amazon pulled existing copies of "1984" by George Orwell because of a licensing dispute. It would be naive to think that a government will not take advantage of this "kill switch" (and it doesn't even have to be a government to be scary, if a company can censor information that's just as bad). If you can back them up, on the other hand, then all is good. Doesn't matter if they're DRMed either, as long as you can load them back onto the reader, we're probably not headed for dystopia.
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Since no one else sells Kindle books, that means 10% of all "book" sales are Kindle. Not over 50%. Ignoring other ebook formats, of course, but so did TFA.
Obviously number of ebooks has gone up, but they don't "surpass print sales in the UK" without a lot of qualifications added to that statement.
Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.
Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
my co-worker's aunt makes $75/hour on the internet. She has been fired from work for six months but last month her income was $15988 just working on the internet for a few hours. Here's the site to read more http://qikr.co/7nn9m
I've been reading the whole Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, in preparation for the release of Brandon Sanderson's completion of the series this next year. I discovered that I'd misplaced a copy or two of the middle hardcover books that I bought over the past 20 years in the fourteen book series, so I bought the missing copies on Kindle. At first I didn't expect to enjoy reading it, but after discovering how to zoom the font, and the relative light weight (considering the size of the Wheel of Time books are huge) I have decided I will no longer buy books of paper. My family all shares the same kindle account with multiple kindles in the family, so we don't have to bother with the restrictions that come with borrowing a book. I can have multiple copies out at once this way. Unfortunately I have hardcovers for the last two in the series, so I have to lug them around, but I've been sorely tempted just to buy another copy of the book in ebook form because it's so convenient to have.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
As long as we are on the topic of ebooks, anybody know of a good ebook reader for *PDF*? A lot technical stuff that I have is in the form of PDFs, and I was wondering if any body had a good experience reading those on ebook reader.
(E-ink based ebook readers, btw, not one of those Tablet-Reader combos like Nook Colour or iPad or whatever)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.
We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.
Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.
I buy around a 100 books a year from Amazon, all used from third party sellers. I think Amazon is comparing new book purchases the Kindle purchases but not taking into account the thriving market in used books. It would be a literally different story if these sales were included.
Does the public domain books that you "buy" and cost 0,00 also count as a sale?
Since no one else sells Kindle books, that means 10% of all "book" sales are Kindle.
Plenty of other sites sell Kindle books.
Don't get me wrong, I live in the Now, and always have an eye down the road for Later but my heart relishes the comforts of Then. From what I observe around me, this is hard-wired into us.
I don't like the idea of books, film and music being only available as ethereal data. I double dislike the idea when one factors in "cloud" storage, and a vendor's ability to remove things from that cloud.
Can you imagine? "License" "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" now in 2012, watch it a bunch of times, then in 2022 try to go to it again only to find.. "Due to violation of Federal Decency Code #A113 paragraph 1313, this title has been removed for your own protection." I *can* see this happening. Good thing I have it in hardcopy here.. You want it? *come and get it*
How about availability? Can you get, 50 years from now, an e-book of some low-run title from some unheard of author? Cinemas are starting to find this out right now.. "Oh, you want "Everybody Sing" (1938, Judy Garland) in 4k DCI? So sorry, we don't have it.. but we do have the last 35mm print known to exist.. what's that you say? You sold your film projectors in the Great Physical Purge of 2012? So sorry to hear that! We can offer you the latest by Michael Ba"----*CLICK*
Speaking broadly, aren't we headed for a possible Digital Alexandria, or a Digital Book Burning Party? Didn't one of the major e-bookstores remove Tom Sawyer from reader's devices? What would prevent this on a much larger scale? What would prevent a government from declaring a title "verbotten" and having the e-vendors pull it from all readers' devices and zap it from the cloud?
I can't think of a world where all the world's books, music and film are sold and contained in "the cloud." I may be getting old, so I may have a skewed perspective on the physical world.. but there's little comfort to be found knowing that I have Mahoromatic on my hard drive, vs. just looking over my shoulder and seeing the 8 books sitting in my shelf, snugly surrounded by other obscure titles that no one in the mainstream cares about. A shelf full of books, film and music is a good sign. To me, anyway.
And yet, as I say all this, one of my back-burner projects is to build a home media server and stuff it with bit-for-bit copies of all my music and film. The physical media itself would remain, right where it is, lining the walls of my favorite room.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I like ebooks. Convenient to get & search and you get modern functionality (font size control, updates, smart indexing, etc). What's not to like? Only one thing: Giving up paper copies means giving someone else control of your library.
Even if you "download" ebook content and keep it out of the cloud, how are you going to read it? Oh, just use a networked device which.... oh, right, that's a fail because devices in the future will not even display forbidden content (and will report your attempt). Never happen because devices like that don't exist and besides people wouldn't stand for it? I was once told no one can possibly keep track of the websites you visit because that mechanism didn't exist and besides people just wouldn't stand for it. How'd that work out?
Only paper can be hidden and read back later without electronic intermediation. That means ONLY PAPER CAN BE HIDDEN. History tells us all unhidden documents are eventually taken. So use your ebook to read the latest thriller/romance/pulp. But PRINT ANY BOOK YOU WANT TO GIVE TO YOUR KIDS.
I love my Kindle Fire, I can make notes, mark pages, read in the dark, buy a new book when I'm done, read the classics for free etc. I will always choose E-book over paper. Lets face it (In the free world) attempts at censorship or governments tracking your reading habits are not a real concern. Will it ever happen, sure in Iran or China, but the free world would strip power from anyone stupid enough to try that.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Bah, you want books in the UK? Go to Hay-on-Wye. It's a small town that has more bookshops than all other kinds of shop put together (population 1500, but 30 book shops)
London may itself be a bit of a special case due to the large number of Universities, and cosmopolitan residents that are perhaps more inclined to enjoy the heft of a physical wad of paper in their hands than the cold and clinical smoothness of an e-book reader.
As for myself, I definitely prefer a paper copy of a book. Something I can stick on a shelf, give to my kids to read one day, lend to a friend, resell if the urge ever hit me and something I can leave in a bag on the beach without worrying about someone stealing it. Most of those things are made much harder, or more pointless, by having e-books.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!