Ebooks Outsell Physical Books on Amazon.com on Christmas Day
Posted on December 28, 2009
Amazon.com says that on Christmas Day ebooks outsold physical books. That is a first in Amazon.com history. Most likely the purchases were by those that got Kindles for Christmas who were loading them up with good things to read.
The company also reported that its Kindle electronic reader became the most "gifted" item in Amazon history. Are bound books soon to be the eight-track tapes of the reading world?We love our Kindle. We also read books on our iPod Touch, although the screen is much smaller. But we just loaded the Kindle software on the iPod and away we went. And with WhisperSync we can read the same book on up to three devices. The software even knows what page we stopped on, regardless of which device we're using. But we also love real books, which we tend to read at home. The Kindle is really for people who are always traveling or out and about, who are voracious readers but don't want to lug a bunch of books around.In another alarming sign for traditional publishers, it seems that Amazon's already cheaper-than-a-physical-book price point of roughly $9.99 is still too expensive for many consumers. An analysis by the lit bloggers at Galley Cat found that 64 of the 100 e-books topping the Kindle best-seller list yesterday were priced at $0.00. Yes, that's right: free. The list of free Kindle best-sellers includes some classics that are in the public domain (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen's zombie-free Pride and Prejudice).
But it also features recent titles from mostly smaller publishers, like the current No. 1, Noel Hynd's Midnight in Madrid, about a U.S. Treasury agent investigating the theft a mysterious relic from a Madrid museum.