Ebooks Now Outselling Print Books At Amazon

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNN: "As further proof of how digital media dominate today's entertainment, Amazon announced Thursday that its customers now buy more e-books for its Kindle device than all print books — hardcover and paperback — combined. Given that people seem to spend more and more of their time peering at glowing electronic screens, this was probably bound to happen. Still, the swiftness of this sea change — three-and-a-half years after the Kindle hit the market — appeared to catch even Amazon by surprise. '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,' said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, in a statement."

Used Book Prices Are Plummeting

[crow_t_robot]

I bought a Kindle but now I find myself exclusively buying used paper because it's waaayy cheaper (many books below $1, some $.01) and I can take the used book to the bookstore and get turn-in value which I can use to buy more books.

What about free books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they counting in free books on this? Roughly 70% of all my Kindle books are free books. Classics that I'm too cheap to pick up for $5 from Borders... And out of the other 30% about half of those were just a few dollars or less.

Re:And Oh the Formats to Support!

[RobotRunAmok]

they fail to address the matrix of which service and format is support/authorized for which device

Matrix, schmatrix.

Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] finds, downloads, converts, views, organizes, tweaks, and edits just about every kind of digital book from/into just about every format. And it's free.

Re:Used Book Prices Are Plummeting

[Ferzerp]

Kindle pricing was really nice prior to Apple getting involved and the resulting publisher price fixing.

Nothing like used, but it was much better than it is now. I'm not so sure that I would have gone that route if the pricing were as it stands currently.

Re:Used Book Prices Are Plummeting

[TheRaven64]

Since I moved house, there are two charity shops within about 2 minutes walk that sell books for under 50p each. At this price, they're impulse purchases, and at least one of them usually has something that looks interesting (often they have sets of things, so I can pick up half a dozen books by the same author and have a couple of weeks worth of reading material). It's a fairly limited selection, but I find I prefer that (see 'the paradox of choice'), because filtering something the size of Amazon's range for things I might want to read is a huge task, and their recommendations are useless.