Bookworms are starting to get the digital itch too. According to Amazon, the Kindle is outselling hardcovers and at a fairly prominent clip. For every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold in the past three months, it has sold 143 Kindle books. And for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold over the past month, it has sold 180 Kindle books. That is a 43 percent and 80 percent gain respectively–clearly the pace is accelerating.
“In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format,” said Jeff Bezos founder and CEO of Amazon.com in the press release. And that fact can not be overlooked. While hardcover book sales grow, eBook sales on the Kindle are out-pacing that growth. eBooks and eReaders cater to two very unique and specific desires of consumers: usability and comfort. An eReading device like the Kindle is more usable than traditional reading, because it allows you to carry around an entire bookshelf in the palm of your hands. And the changing consumer behaviors and habits are more comfortable with digital reading opposed to traditional reading. Consumption on the go.
Hidden in the press release was this little tidbit: from Bezos, “the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189.” Good news for the Kindle and Amazon. However this move wasn’t made without some haste. The price reduction was in sync with rival eReader manufacture Barnes & Noble dropping the price on the dual-screen Nook from $259 to $159.
Subsequently, the price reductions in the eReader space had everything to do with the release of the Apple iPad. The iPad is a more appealing eReader-compatible device. However, the biggest competitor might actually be the iPhone devices themselves. With the newly released iOS4, Apple’s iBooks app is brought to millions of devices. Jolie O’Dell of Mashable said it best: Although the iPhone lacks the larger screen and more book-friendly interface of the iPad, the barrier to entry is now ridiculously low, since all a current iPhone user has to do is download the free iBooks app and start browsing for titles with no extra hardware required. And with the recent release of Flipboard for the iPad this week, we are getting our first look at a Netflix style to reading dubbed social magazines.
Longterm success is undoubtedly dependent on the Kindle’s e-book store sales across platforms as opposed to actual physical sales. In that regard, Apple can be seen as the model for success. What they’ve created with iTunes and the App Store can be a good gauge for the raw potential of e-store sales.
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