20.Jul.2010 Countdown to Book Apocalypse

Amazon says it sells more e-books than hardcovers. Does this mean our 500-year old technology (the book) is ready for the dumper? Not quite. Shoppers at Amazon.com are already pretty tech-inclined and buying an e-book online has several advantages over print at that particular point-of-sale (immediate gratification, no shipping charges). A lot of the article, upon inspection, is a marketing piece for e-books, since hardcover book sales are up as well and the figures for paperbacks have not been linked conclusively to sales of non-print materials.

Amazon painted a picture of accelerating growth in sales of e-books, which can be read on the Kindle and through software on a host of other devices, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone. The figures don’t include free e-books.

Over the past month, the Seattle retailer sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it sold, it said.

“That is dramatic evidence of how powerful the e-book is now,” said Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. “What the iPad and other book reading devices have done is just raise the overall e-book market—and Amazon is extremely well positioned to take advantage of it.”

Print isn’t going anywhere soon. E-books and printed books will have to co-exist for at least the next 100 years, even if books end up being kind of like vinyl records (artisanal, expensive, pretentious) Maybe we’ll wait a couple days before we purge our redundant books in a cleansing bonfire.