Amazon, a company that was founded on selling books, is now selling more Kindle Books than paperback books, according to Amazon’s fourth quarter sales announcement, which indicated Amazon’s sales increased 36% to $12.95 billion in Q4.
Throughout all of last year Amazon sold 115 Kindle ebooks for every 100 paperbacks sold, and three times as many Kindle books as hardcovers—considering paperback sales continued to grow and free Kindle ebooks were omitted that’s even more impressive.
Back in July, Amazon stated that Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover sales by 43%. At the time, Amazon had expected Kindle books to start outselling paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so sales have outpaced Amazon’s own expectations considerably.
Another interesting point, Amazon sold “millions” of Kindle 3‘s during the forth quarter—that’s about as specific as it gets regarding Kindle numbers. Amazon’s policy is not to divulge actual Kindle sales numbers, keeping the competition guessing.
The last bit of Kindle-related news from the press release is that the U.S. Kindle Store has grown to more than 810,000 ebooks, not counting the millions of free public domain titles. Over 82% of those ebooks are priced at $9.99 or less, including 74 of the 107 New York Times Bestsellers.
It will be interesting to see what these numbers are at this time next year.