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E-Books for the Kindle officially outsell actual, hardcover books
By Ben ReiningaJuly 19th, 2010, 5:25 pmComments (4)
It's a good lesson — most things you think are incredibly geeky and square will one day turn out to be the epitome of cool. High-waisted jeans, thick-rimmed glasses, cupcakes, Dugeons & Dragons (okay, so that's actually still dorky as hell). And now, Kindles.
That's right, the Kindle — that awkward white rectangle, the onetime 'pocket-protector of new technology' is officially king. Today, Amazon is reporting that hardcover books have continuously been outsold by e-books. Just six months ago, near Christmas, a brief surge in e-book sales that beat out hardcover book sales was treated like an interesting anomaly - and the kid with the Kindle still might as well have been carrying an erector set. Now, it's been the norm for three months and counting.
With the increasing popularity of e-readers, the release of the iPad, and Amazon's recent decision to slash Kindle prices by almost half, it's hardly surprising news. Plus, there's the simple fact that a hardcover book costs about ten times as much as an e-book, (and weighs approximately a thousand times as much). Still, I can't help but feel a little nostalgia. What are aging aunts and uncles going to buy for their college-age relatives whom they never speak to?
Commentarium (4 Comments)
This seemed sort of inevitable, but popularity increased far more quickly than I would have predicted. I'm interested in what my room (without bookshelves) and the publishing industry will look like in ten years.
Seems like everyone on the train is reading a Kindle nowadays. I still prefer good old fashioned books because of their smell (and you can get them at a library for free), but there are a few reasons that the Kindle is objectively worse. As I understand technology (which is not much), if the way we store data progresses after a significant point, the books on your Kindle will be lost. It would be possible to save them, but some kind of anti-piracy measure prevents that. I'm iffy on the details on this one, and I might be totally wrong. The other main thing is that Kindle users have to read a certain amount of books to make the Kindle profitable (assuming they would be buying and not renting books instead), and they have to do so before they want to get whatever new gadget replaces the Kindle, so it's not great for slow readers or tech junkies. And of course, there's the fact that fewer books are on the Kindle, it's harder to note the text, and you don't retain as much because there's no smell. But there are obvious advantages to most readers, so this is basically not a surprise.
I'm not that surprised, it's really easy to buy books on impulse on the Kindle (and pretty dangerous to the wallet). I've been reading a lot of the public-domain stuff that you can get free or for a buck, so it's been good for me.
as for e-books vs. tree-books, there are still a number of books I'll want in paper form to save on my shelves, but the Kindle is my medium of choice for the light reads, story collections and magazines that I would usually send to the yard sale or recycling bin.
I'm conflicted. On one hand I love the feel of reading an actual book, and it just feels right. On the other hand you have to actually store them, and if your like me you buy maybe 50-100 books a year. They get dusty and are heavy to transport. You eventually run out of room.
I might go to ebooks in the near future.
Now you say something