Amazon’s Kindle—as you may already know—is now at $189. This is quite a drop from the original price of $399. The result of the price drop was that sales tripled.
You may have also seen that Amazon is touting that for the first time their e-Book sales have overtaken hardcover sales. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures, but they are revealing that in this last quarter they sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. This does not include their 2 million or so free books
This is indeed an interesting figure. I think we should probably take it with a grain of salt, though—given that the comparison is a bit apples to oranges. (Hey, if the Apostle Paul can mix metaphors, why can’t I?) There are lots of Kindle books that you can buy for $0.99 because they are in the public domain. So one person could drop $50 and get 50 books—and that 50 is counting against the one guy who spent $20 on a hardcover. If you took non-public-domain books out of the mix, I suspect hardcovers would still outsell e-Books. But Amazon only releases the sales stats that they want to release, so we can’t know any of this for sure.
All to say, it’s a good day of publicity for Amazon, and no one should doubt that e-Books are here to stay—and increase.