Kindle e-books benefit from price war and now outselling hardcovers
21 July 2010
This week it was announced that Amazon is now selling more e-books via the kindle than traditional hardcover books.
During the second quarter of the year Amazon has sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover. An impressive ratio, however when you take a look at just the last month the growth rate is even more impressive – for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
Although some of this success must be attributed to the change in reading trends, the huge surge in growth over the last month seems to be a direct result of June’s price war between key players in the e-reader market. Earlier in June, Barnes & Noble reduced the price of the 3G Nook to $199 and then launched their Wi-Fi model at just $149. In response Amazon then slashed the price of the Kindle by $70 bringing it to sub $200 at $189.
CEO Jeff Bezos said “ We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle—the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189. In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books—astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”
It will be interesting to see how others respond to this success and how this growth rate of e-books is affected amongst Amazon’s competition. Price wars usually spell uncertainty for all involved, the long-term success may eventually be about the content and availability across multiple platforms so between the virtual bookstores opposed to the device.
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