Online retailer Amazon has given us a peek inside its famously secretive books, announcing that sales of electronic books on its site have outpaced sales of hardcover tomes.
For every 100 hardbacks sold in the last three months, Amazon says it has sold 143 e-books, for its own proprietary Kindle and other e-reading devices.
Why let us know now how well the medium is doing? Marketplace public radio reporter John Dimsdale posits that it’s because Apple has stolen much of Amazon’s thunder with its sensational iPad and its growing popularity as a platform for e-books through its iBook store, modeled after its successful iTunes music store.
More than an interesting but hyperbolic anecdote about the impending death of the hardcover book (rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated), Amazon’s rare insight into its sales figures is a sort of publicity stunt that reveals just how high the stakes have become in the e-reader market.
The year 2010 began with a price war over the content publishers provide for these gadgets, and six months later that issue was settled and hardware such as the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook were duking it out at the virtual cash register as their respective companies were slashing prices almost daily.
Does Amazon’s news mean that the printed word is on its way out? It’s doubtful, at least for a long while. Paperback books, responsible for much of the democratization of literature and knowledge we take for granted today, are holding their own — for now — and libraries are more popular than ever due to the recession forcing families to cut back on their entertainment budgets and book-buying.
But you never know, do you?
