Amazon Reveals That Kindle Book Sales Are Now Higher Than Paperback Sales

Some months ago, Amazon announced that they were selling more Kindle books than hardbacks.Now it seems that Kindle book sales have overtaken paperback sales as well. It surely can’t be long before Kindle book sales are higher than both paperback and hardback sales combined.

It’s almost inevitable in a way.After all, people who are prepared to shell out $ 139 for a Kindle reader are going to be the ones who read a lot of books aren’t they? There will always be a few bibliophiles who prefer reading a “real” book – but, over the piece, we do appear to be heading towards a scenario where e-books assume ever greater importance in the literary world.

There’s certainly no shortage of Kindle books for prospective customers to choose from.Currently there are in excess of 800,000 Kindle books on sale on Amazon’s Kindle store. That number is growing every day – and there are an additional 1.8 million out of copyright books which are available as free downloads. These include titles by authors such as Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Homer, Virgil to name but a few.

Amazon has also released a variety of free apps to allow Kindle books to be read without the use of a Kindle reader. These exist for the PC, the Mac, the Apple iPad, the iPod Touch, the Blackberry smart phone and any device which runs Android. An app for the HP tablet computer is believed to be imminent. What this means is that users needn’t worry about their Kindle becoming obsolete. Additionally, each app also serves as an extra retail outlet for Amazon.

Estimates put Amazon’s share of the current e-book market at approximately 90%. That’s not sustainable in the long term and industry experts are suggesting that we will see a three way split between Google, Apple and Amazon – of roughly equal proportions – by 2015. However, many of those same analysts predicted that the launch of Apple’s iPad would sound the death knell for the Kindle, and they didn’t exactly get that right did they?

In fact, the new third generation Kindle reader is selling more quickly than ever. It was Amazon’s best selling product (again) during the 2010 festive sales season, and the Kindle has now been Amazon’s best selling item for 18 months. 2011 sales forecasts have been increased from 5 million Kindles to 8 million, based upon recent sales returns. Some market rationalisation seems inevitable in future, but there’s nothing to suggest any reduction in the Kindle’s dominance in the short to medium term.