Amazon put out a press release today. Here are the high points:
“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”
…
Recent milestones for Kindle books include:
- Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
- Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
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Another sad case of “selective data” from Amazon, meant to deceive rather than illuminate. Choose the most expensive book format on Amazon, and compare its sales to one of the least expensive. It would be just as revealing to know the ratio of toaster-oven sales to eBooks.
But of course it’s reported EVERYWHERE, further accelerating eBook mythology and countering a growing chorus of analysts concerned about competition to the Kindle from the iPad and other devices.
Paperbacks outsell hardcovers by a higher ratio than eBooks to hardcovers. And as the report in the Wall Street Journal concluded: “The statistics that Amazon shared in the Monday news release were all relative—the company stopped short of sharing actual sales figures. The company has never said how many Kindle devices or e-books it has sold.”
Bezos is very smart and works the patsies in the press like the maestro he’s become.
TBH, I’m still thinking about it. I don’t see the selective data.