The End of Books? eBook Sales Pass Real Book Sales

Filed in archive Shopping on December 30, 2009

© adria.richards


Mashable had a piece just after Christmas pointing out that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever the sale of eBooks passed the sale of real books (you know, the kind made of paper) on that day.

Was it an anomaly? More likely the start of a trend.

Amazon sold just under two gajillion Kindle eReaders in the lead up to Christmas. Everyone opened their Kindles Christmas morning and when straight to Amazon.com to fill up the hard drives with e-books to read. The next day the sales were probably back to old fashioned paper books. But more and more people will end up with a Kindle (or one of the competing eReaders) and paper books are going to continue to lose market share.

The up side in my view is that books will never go out of print. You'll always be able to find a digital copy of Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus of you really want one...