Amazon claims ebook sales milestone

For the first time, sales of ebooks outstripped those of hardbacks

It is an announcement that will provoke horror among those who can think of nothing better than spending an afternoon rummaging around a musty old bookshop. In what could be a watershed for the publishing industry, Amazon said sales of digital books have outstripped U.S. sales of hardbacks on its Website for the first time.

Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a “tipping point”, with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date.
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Kindle 2 is here

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is going for a hardsell. He appeared on Comedy Central’s Daily Show with John Stewart. to promote the Kindle 2, unveiled to eagerly awaiting audiences. And despite the hosts' less than charitable comments on the price and user-friendliness of the gadget, explained its positives.
While many salivated over this week's arrival of "the iPod of the book world," supporters of open e-book standards are not sure that Kindle’s format is not only bad for readers but, in the long run, possibly for Amazon too. “Either Amazon will succeed in locking people in, at which point it will become a kind of mash-up of the worst elements of the Recording Industry Association of America, Microsoft and the mafia, or they’ll fail,” said Cory Doctorow, open source advocate, science-fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.
David Pogue of The New York Times’ ran through a long list of Kindle 2 pros and cons, lauding its screen and battery life and shooting down the notion that it will replace good ol’ paper and glue. He offers as good an explanation as any for the reason books are here to stay: “Nothing ever replaces anything.”
Steven levy of the Wired said, "Overall, Kindle 2 addresses the key problems with the original, boosts performance and points to some interesting directions. Now we're a little bit further down the road toward e-book Nirvana."