Amazon has announced that Kindle ebook sales now outnumber physical paperback and hardback sales, the digital platform overtaking print in just four years. Since April 1, Amazon says, it has sold 105 Kindle ebooks for every 100 print books on its US site. That’s not just limited to cases where both formats are available, either; it takes into account print titles where no Kindle equivalent is on offer (though free Kindle ebooks aren’t counted).
Amazon has begun shipping the ad-supported Kindle it announced earlier this month, around a week earlier than expected. The Kindle with Special Offers gives users the opportunity to save $25 off the price of a third-gen WiFi-only Kindle, in return for agreeing to view adverts on the homescreen and sponsored screensavers.
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Unofficial ebook libraries, where users share digital books between themselves, have flourished in a murky legal halfway house so far, but Amazon is looking to make the whole thing official - albeit on its own terms. Later this year will see the launch of Library Lending for Kindle Books, offering Kindle-format ebooks from 11,000 libraries across the US.
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Once Amazon decided to let Kindle users lend out books, it was only a matter of time until services sprung up to open up lending to the wider world. Lendle was one of those services, but now Amazon has pulled the plug on them. Today, Lendle's website states: "Amazon has revoked Lendle’s API access. Unfortunately, Lendle is unavailable indefinitely. We will do everything we can to restore service soon."
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I will never understand why the publishing world thinks that allowing digital content and downloads will hurt their business anymore than allowing rentals of physical content does. In some libraries you can check out eBooks just as you do physical books. This makes sense for the library because it can have more copies that of a book without needing more space. It's better for the reader too because they can get what they want when they want it on their eReader.
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For a while now we, at Creative Strategies, have been involved in projects within the digital reader ecosystem. We have been talking and working with both publishers and hardware OEM’s who either have a presence or want a presence in this market. E-Readers and Tablet sales combined could be between 60-70 million in 2011*.
Regardless of where we are now in the adoption cycle of e-readers and tablets one thing is now clear: the shift from analog to digital in books is happening rapidly.
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Ebooks from publisher Random House have begun to show up in Apple's iBookstore, ahead of what's likely to be a name-check at the iPad 2 event in just a few hours time. The publisher had announced a switch to so-called Agency Pricing - in which publishers not retailers set the consumer prices for each electronic title, and then provide the retailers with a commission for the sale - earlier in the week.
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Barnes & Noble has announced that its NOOK range has become the retailer's biggest selling line in the company's history, with the NOOKcolor taking the number one spot as the best-selling gift of the holidays. Meanwhile, almost one million B&N ebooks were purchased on Christmas Day, despite widespread reports of server issues plaguing the service for the holiday weekend.
Updated with B&N statement on the server outages after the cut
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Amazon has turned on Kindle ebook loans in the US, meaning readers can now share certain titles with their friends for a limited period. Announced back in October 2010, the functionality allows ebooks to be loaned to a single person for up to 14 days, though during that period the original owner will not be able to access it themselves.
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Apple has been accused of selling pirated ebooks by Japanese authors in its iBookstore, with titles by high-profile authors such as Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino among the texts. According to a consortium of Japanese publishers, "some of the works have been deleted in response to requests from authors and publishers but a majority of them continue to be illegally distributed."
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The WikiLeaks Kindle ebook on Amazon UK has is prompting further controversy, with Amazon adding a statement to the product page and various reports that the author had taken the text down. However, at time of writing the ebook is still listed as available to buy, albeit with the added proviso that "This book contains commentary and analysis regarding recent WikiLeaks disclosures, not the original material disclosed via the WikiLeaks website."
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No small amount of irony today, as a Kindle version of the full WikiLeaks cables turns up on Amazon. The site content itself was yanked from the online retailer's hosting arm last week, over allegations that the leaked cables contravene the AWS terms of service; however, as reviewers have been quick to flag up, that doesn't stop Amazon making some money on sales of the ebook.
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