It had to happen eventually, and it's not really a surprise, considering people don't tend to shop online for books on Christmas Day but... it will be marked down in history, that's for sure -- Christmas Day 2009: the day digital books outsold their physical, paper counterparts,(At Amazon anyway).It's a misleading statistic, as I said: no one buys paper books online on Christmas Day -- people do, however, log in with their new Kindles and buy some ebooks.The actual number worth paying heed to is the sheer volume of Kindles that were sold or gifted this year -- a number that Amazon seems unwilling to divulge.
Estimates put their 2009 sales figures at over 500,00 units. Couple that with 390,000 books now available in the Kindle Store and you can see that this might be the beginning of the end for physical books. At the very least we may see a cut in the wholesale price of books. I've never really thought about it before, but book publishers don't have any competition: no one else can sell a paper-back edition of Harry Potter in any given market. A digital version of Harry Potter, with a ubiquitous reader like the Kindle would result in real, honest-to-God competition.
Amazon, as part of the same press release, also gave us some interesting stats and holiday sales numbers. The best one, I think, is that they shipped 7 million units in one day at the peak of the holiday season. They maxed out at 9.5 million items ordered in one day -- 110 per second. But go read the press release, if you want more.
Amazon sells more Kindle books than conventional tree-murderin' books originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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