It will only be a matter of time before printed, paper-based books will go the way of the dinosaur as a business model in publishing. With e-book readers and tablets now proliferating the world, more and more people now prefer reading the electronic version of popular book titles than the traditional paper-based sort. And this time, the change may be evident in the numbers that Amazon has recently provided.Amazon, the popular online book retailer for both the electronic and the traditional kind, recently announced that its customers are now buying more e-books for its Kindle e-book device than traditional books, both the hardback and the paperback versions combined. It took around three years (the period that the Kindle has been available in the market) for this to happen, the quick turnover of which also caught the online company by surprise.
According to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.”
Although this may already have been expected to happen any time soon, it may not totally represent the whole picture. The sales of printed books from other book shops and book retailers have not yet been factored in. The numbers may only refer to the sales that Amazon has made for both its Kindle and printed book divisions. On the whole, e-books still remain as a small part of the overall book market. But it is expected to reach 20 percent growth in a couple of years, according to analysts.
Source: CNN
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