Kindle Books Defeat Paper Books on Amazon

By Lucy Mitchell
Jan 29 2011

Amazon, the worlds largest US-based online retailer announced yesterday that Kindle digital books have now out sold all other forms of books on their website.

This is a dramatic turn of events for the entire publishing world. Electronic books have actually been in existence since the early days of the web explosion, about 20 years ago. However, in the early days they were available only on the computer and that made them hard to read for some people.

E-readers were developed at one point but the first models were bulky and expensive. The craze surrounding e-books was starting to fade when Amazon designed their first generation Kindle. This sparked new interest in the field of digital books.

It was not until the newest Kindle was released that the e-book craze really took hold. It was easily one of the best-selling items for last year’s Christmas season and continued to sell in massive quantities around the world.

Now Kindle books have out sold the paper versions on Amazon and other companies are reporting similar sales results. This may signal that a change is coming in the tide of publishing in the US and abroad.

Amazon leaders said that they fully expect that this digital craze will continue. This is likely due to fact that e-books are far less expensive than the paper style books. This could change the entire face of publishing as it is far cheaper for publishers to produce e-books than the other styles.