Trees Rejoice: Amazon Sells More Kindle Books Than Hardcovers

From Amazon:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

 

Full press release below

KINDLE DEVICE UNIT SALES ACCELERATE EACH MONTH IN SECOND QUARTER;
NEW $189 PRICE RESULTS IN TIPPING POINT FOR GROWTH

Amazon.com now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books

SEATTLE-July 19, 2010-(NASDAQ: AMZN)-Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the #1 bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon.com. Today, Amazon.com announced that Kindle device unit sales accelerated each month in the second quarter-both on a sequential month-over-month basis and on a year-over-year basis.

"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," said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "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."

Kindle offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 630,000 books, including New Releases and 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 510,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 75 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

Recent milestones for Kindle books include:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

Five authors-Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts-have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

Readers are responding to Kindle's uncompromising approach to the reading experience. Weighing 10.2 ounces, Kindle can be held comfortably in one hand for hours, has an e-ink display that is easy on the eyes even in bright daylight, has two weeks of battery life, lets you buy your books once and read them everywhere-on your Kindle, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices-and has free 3G wireless with no monthly fees or annual contracts-all at a $189 price.

SOURCE: Amazon.com

 

What does this mean exactly? Well it could be a tipping point. It was only a matter of time. With music, newspapers and magazines going digital over the past 10 years, books had to make the jump sooner or later.

 

What do you think? Are physical books over or do they still carry some appeal? Let me know in the comments!

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Why Should You Start Using Dropbox?

We often save our most important data and information on our computers without giving it a second thought due to the reliability they have provided recently. This is great until your hard disks fails or your PC / Laptop gets stolen. They can even burn up in a fire or we delete our stuff on our own by accident. All of that can happen and if it does we can only be thankful for a recent – up to date backup which will bring back your most valuable data.

 

Now you should use external hard drives for backups but they are not totally safe against damage or theft either. Any physical media is susceptible to failure. To resolve this issue, a very good and cheap method to backup your data online and in the cloud is Dropbox. There is a free basic plan with 2 GB space, and two pro plans with 50 GB for $9.99 per month or 100 GB for $19.99 per month. The free basic plan is more than enough for most users.

 

Why Dropbox?

 

Let's say you're editing a document at home. As soon as you click 'Save', Dropbox will sync this same file to all your other computers and your mobile devices (iPhone, Android and Blackberry coming soon!) instantly and automatically. It's as if you saved the document to all of your computers. This gives you the freedom to work on any of your computers and always have the files you need.

 

You can easily share entire folders or photo albums with Dropbox. You can also send people links to specific files within your Dropbox.

 

 

Any file you put into your Dropbox folder is automatically backed up to their servers. Even if your computer has a melt-down, your files are safe on Dropbox and can be restored at any time.

 

Dropbox Replaces:

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people
• Using USB drives to move files between computers
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions
• Complicated backup software and hardware

 

 

Setting Up Dropbox

Signup

In order to sign up with Dropbox go to Dropbox Signup (With this Referral you will receive a 250 MB bonus on top of your 2 GB free space automatically!)

 

Download

After the successful registration, the download of the Dropbox application should start automatically. Dropbox is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

 

Install

Double click the downloaded application and start the install by clicking “Install”

 

Now Dropbox should be installed and up and running. When prompted, fill in the same data you filled in for your registration and choose either the free plan with 2 GB or one of the pro plans. Again, go with the 2 GB plan unless you need more space.

 

Working with Dropbox

Dropbox has created a folder on your computer which will synchronize with the online backup on each change.You can double click the Dropbox icon in your task bar to open that folder, or just right click the icon to get more options.

 

Backup

You are now able to change, delete and then copy files and folders with your most important data in the Dropbox folder, these will be automatically uploaded to the online cloud. Should you ever delete something from that folder by accident then you got about a month worth of time after deletion to be able to un-delete those files – also all changes will be saved should you need a previous version of a file.

 

Dropbox can also be used for various other things like an image gallery, to make files publicly downloadable or to share files to your friends and family.

 

I have been using Dropbox for about 6 months and the reason why I like it so much is because it's so easy and seamless to use. It just works and is dead simple. Also having the ability to have my files on my Android phone makes life a lot easier.

 

If you are interested in Dropbox, I highly recommend this backup solution. Sign up for Dropbox here!  

 

Are you already using Dropbox? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Posted via email from Neville's Blog

Android Surging in U.S. Smartphone Market; RIM Still Tops

USA Today is reporting that BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is king of the smartphone hill, according to data released by researcher comScore.

RIM had a 41.7% market share among smartphone platforms, topping Apple (iPhone) 24.4%, Microsoft (Windows) 13.2% and Google (Android) 13.0%. Palm, which was recently acquired by HP, lagged with a 4.8 % share.

The folks at RIM may not want to get overly giddy. The numbers reflect the three month period ending in May 2010, prior to the iPhone 4's release and before a slew of new Google Android devices invaded the market, including the HTC Evo 4G from Sprint and Motorola's Droid X from Verizon.

Most of the momentum indeed points to Android. Google gained four percentage points compared to the previous three month reporting period of February 2010, the only smartphone rival with a positive point change in market share during that time.

Still, comScore says overall smartphone ownership continues to grow, with 49.1 million people in the U.S. now owning such a device, up 8.1 percent over the corresponding February period.


I suspect that RIM will be king for another 1 - 2 years as companies relax use of non-blackberry phones on their networks. With the failure of KIN, Microsoft needs a home run with Windows Phone 7.

The competition in the mobile phone market will only get more fierce as more users move to smartphones. We are not even near 80 saturation of the smartphone market, so this a great time for companies to build device/brand loyalty.

How long do you think RIM can hang on? Let me know in the comments!

Read the post at USA Today.

Posted via email from Neville's Blog