First, Amazon announced that Kindle Books were outselling Hardcovers. Now, Kindle Books have outpaced paperbacks. For every 100 paperback books the company has sold, they have sold 115 Kindle books. During the same period, they sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These numbers are for the United States, of course.
The Amazon Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, of which 670,000 are $9.99 or less, in addition to millions of out of copyright titles.
But why is this the truth?
- The Price is Right: The Kindle 3 Wi-Fi is $139, and $50 extra gets you lifetime 3G. They will likely continue to try and bring the price to sub-$100.
- You don’t need a Kindle to Read Kindle Books: There are Kindle apps for every mobile platform, desktop(Linux excepted), and for the Web(full content pending). You can read a book anywhere.
- Whispersync: Not only can you read it anywhere, but it remembers where you where you left off when device-hopping.
- Simplicity: Amazon focused on a replacement to the book experience. It didn’t try to make a device that did everything, like a tablet. It may make one of these someday, however. But their design focuses on readability, battery life, etc.
And we say all this being a latecomer to the Kindle, after we thought it was too expensive, during the early days.
