eBooks v Paperbacks

And now, Amazon has announced that eBook sales are higher than paperbacks. Across all titles. From The Guardian:

“Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books.

“This is across Amazon.com’s entire US book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.”

 

Oz eBooks from Readings

Readings have just started selling eBooks on their website:

We are initially launching with a number of titles from a selection of independent Australian publishers, and will be signing up larger pub- lishers in the coming months. We hope that, over time, Readings ebooks will become the online version of our great physical bookshops.

They’re using a browser-based system and currently focussing on Oz and independent publishers.

(via Mactalk)

 

The Way we Read

One of the most common responses about electronic reading has been the ‘I sit at my desk all day at work – the last thing I want to do after that is look at my computer’ complaint. It seems that devices like the ipad are changing this dramatically; the data for reading online material is really interesting. From read it later:

Aside from a quick lunch hour at their desk, iPad owners are no longer doing the majority of their reading on their computers.  They are saving it for their personal prime time, when they can relax comfortably, iPad in hand and burn through the content they found during the day.

Whilst this speaks mainly to online content, it’s clear that ipad (and similar) users don’t use their ipads the same way they use their computers. It’s another type of device, that is serving as a way to get them reading electronic texts, away from their desks…