Kindle out sells real books for the first time.

[Germanicus]

Sales of digital e-books have outstripped real books for the first time, according to Amazon.
Four years after the launch of electronic novels, the firm announced it has sold 105 e-books for every 100 printed books over the past six weeks.
While e-book sales have previously outsold hardback books, never before have they exceeded sales of all books, in both hardback and paperback forms.
The books can be read on a range of electronic devices - from Kindles to computers, iPods, iPhones, iPads and BlackBerrys.
Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said it was a shock that sales had taken hold of the market so quickly.
He said: '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.'
2001 appears, so far, to have been a crucial year for e-book sales. Since January Amazon has shifted more than three times as many Kindle books as it did in the same period last year.
E-BOOKS IN NUMBERS
Since April 1, for every 100 hardback or paperback print books sold on Amazon, it has shifted 105 Kindle books
With the rise of the e-book, 2011 has been the fastest growing year for Amazon's U.S. books business in more than a decade
Three times as many e-books have been sold so far in 2011 compared with last year
Its best-selling Kindle currently costs $114 in the U.S. and £111 in the UK
In Britain, Kindle books are outselling hardcover books at a rate of more than two to one
The U.S. Kindle Store now sells more than 950,000 books, with more than 175,000 added in the past five months
The figures, which are for its U.S. website, are not just limited to cases where both formats are available - they include printed books for which there is no electronic edition.
Free e-books have also not been taken into account, for the sake of fairness.
Outside the U.S., figures are also massively on the rise.
In the U.K., where Amazon's Kindle store opened only a year ago, e-books now outsell hardbacks at a ratio of two-to-one.

Amazon began selling hardcover and paperback books in July 1995.
Twelve years later it launched e-books and by July 2010 Kindle book sales had surpassed sales of hardbacks.
Six months later Kindle books began outselling paperbacks and now the format is more popular than all text books put together.
The Kindle bookstore offers more than 950,000 books for sale as well as more than 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...time-ever.html



I had a kindle given to me as a present for Xmas, i have yet to download a book.

[Magister Eckhart]

God help us all.

Hopefully Fahrenheit 451 and The Time Machine were among the downloaded books so people see where this is leading and repent of the error of digitising all of our knowledge. I doubt anyone actually learns anything from reading those books though-- if they did we'd have a very different situation in the West today.