Cover via Amazon
My fellow Forbes blogger Eric Savitz reported earlier today that Amazon has announced that since April, it's sold more e-books for the Kindle than it has print books - by a ratio of 105 Kindle books to 100 print books -- and that's both hardcover and softcover combined.
I'm not going to lie - when I first saw that number, I scoffed a little. After all, looking at my own Kindle, there was a pattern - most of the books on my Kindle are books for which I paid the same price - $0.00. Which are recorded in my Amazon account as "sales" and for which I have receipts. I also have several magazine subscriptions on my Kindle.
Now, according to the press release, free books don't count. So I sent a quick inquiry to Amazon to verify that they weren't counting free books and asked whether subscriptions counted.
The answer? No, they aren't counting free books. And no, they're not counting subscriptions, either. Color me very impressed.
So what does this finding mean? The Atlantic's Megan McArdle thinks it means the beginning of the end for print books.
I'm pretty sure the print book's days are numbered for anything except specialty applications. The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.
I'm not so sure. For one thing, I'm pretty sure that children's books are going to remain print only for a long, long time -- at least, until someone develops a drool-proof, dog-proof, crayon-proof, drop-proof, paint-proof, drink-proof, food-proof, color e-reader. Especially when you consider that most e-readers are hooked up to the internet for instant purchasing. Kids and no limits on online spending seems like a bad combination to me.
There are also some real questions about the practicality of e-books for the textbook market. Alan Jacobs notes some of the difficulties in teaching from a Kindle here.
Everything I habitually do in class is incredibly laborious with a Kindle, especially if my students have codex versions, and radically so if the Kindle edition doesn't have page numbers. And it's even worse if the Kindle edition doesn't have the chapter breaks coded in: with encoded chapter breaks I can at least use the left button on the five-way controller to go back and see what chapter I'm in, but if the chapter breaks aren't coded, then I can only click back a page at a time until I find the chapter number, and then click forward until get back where I was. And even then I won't know how far I am into the chapter. All of this makes it very hard for me to know how to get my students looking at the same portion of the text that I'm looking at.
A study of Kindle DX use by students at the University of Washington notes some other difficulties:
The researchers interviewed 39 first-year graduate students in the UW’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering, 7 women and 32 men, ranging from 21 to 53 years old.
By spring quarter of 2010, seven months into the study, less than 40 percent of the students were regularly doing their academic reading on the Kindle DX. Reasons included the device’s lack of support for taking notes and difficulty in looking up references. (Amazon Corp., which makes the Kindle DX, has since improved some of these features.)
The bottom line? For the next few years, anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to see e-reading become the dominant form of pleasure reading for adults. Speaking for myself, I love reading on my Kindle. But when it comes to childrens books, reference materials, and serious use in academia, I think that print books will be dominant for a long while.
