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Amazon sells more Kindle books than conventional tree-murderin' books
It had to happen eventually, and it's not really a surprise, considering people don't tend to shop online for books on Christmas Day but... it will be marked down in history, that's for sure -- Christmas Day 2009: the day digital books outsold their physical, paper counterparts,(At Amazon anyway).It's a misleading statistic, as I said: no one buys paper books online on Christmas Day -- people do, however, log in with their new Kindles and buy some ebooks.The actual number worth paying heed to is the sheer volume of Kindles that were sold or gifted this year -- a number that Amazon seems unwilling to divulge.
Estimates put their 2009 sales figures at over 500,00 units. Couple that with 390,000 books now available in the Kindle Store and you can see that this might be the beginning of the end for physical books. At the very least we may see a cut in the wholesale price of books. I've never really thought about it before, but book publishers don't have any competition: no one else can sell a paper-back edition of Harry Potter in any given market. A digital version of Harry Potter, with a ubiquitous reader like the Kindle would result in real, honest-to-God competition.
Amazon, as part of the same press release, also gave us some interesting stats and holiday sales numbers. The best one, I think, is that they shipped 7 million units in one day at the peak of the holiday season. They maxed out at 9.5 million items ordered in one day -- 110 per second. But go read the press release, if you want more.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsDoug HDec 27th 2009 3:29PM
It's a misleading statistic....yes, so lets perpetuate by not correcting the title of the article.
SlappyDec 27th 2009 6:34PM
"that this might be the beginning of the end for physical books. At the very least we may see a cut in the wholesale price of books."
Books and Kindles have got to be different markets: For some adopters, eventually there's a "break even point" but for most people having a(nother) electronic device isn't going to do the trick especially when it costs hundreds of dollars.
larsDec 28th 2009 5:15PM
I'd buy one, if they would ship in from within EU. But nooooo, always from the states, and therefore the price gets a lot higher due to VAT, import tax etc.
JamesDec 29th 2009 12:44PM
I'm sure many things digital outsell their physical counterparts on Christmas Day. I see two factors that make this likely. First, physical stores tend to be closed on Christmas while online stores never close. Second, digital gifts are usually delivered immediately; You don't often have an option of the delivery date. Thus if you want to buy something digital as a gift, you have to buy it the same day you want to give it or you ruin the surprise.
Kindle books outselling physical books is probably just an artifact of the system rather than a sign of anything meaningful. What are the odds that digital download game purchases outsold physical games on Christmas too?