Amazon issued a press release today saying that Kindle sales have increased each month in the 2nd quarter and that sales have tripled since the $70 price-cut down to $189.
Even bigger news, Amazon is now selling 43% more Kindle Books than hardcover books over the past 3 months. As always, they haven’t revealed any actual overall sales figures, but there is quite a lot of interesting information in the press release minus the sales speak:
“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”
Recent milestones for Kindle books include:
- Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.
- Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
- The Association of American Publishers’ latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.
- On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.
- Five authors–Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts–have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.
Read the press release more carefully. Amazon did not say that Kindle sales tripled. They said that the *growth* of Kindle sales tripled. So if they’d been selling 1% more each month than the month before, the month after the price change they sold 3% more than the month before.
Many news outlets got tripped up by this wording, and it was widely misreported.